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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

it's an interesting article because it suggests it might be possible for smart enough software running on a general purpose parallel cpu to compete with a GPU when rendering graphics, using the same amount of silicon.

...so GPUs are just a temporary hack, waiting for smart enough software (and some tweaking of the CPU instruction set) to catch up.

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Hardware is always a temporary hack. There's always a back and forth going on between specialized hardware and general purpose cpu. In the end though, software always (slightly) outpaces the hardware.

When all is said and done though, We'll be moving to realtime raytracing/radiosity for 3d rendering.

That's silly. Programmers are being brow-beaten into radically changing their programming style to accommodate a drastic 90-degree turn in the evolution of hardware, from general-purpose serial to parallel and SIMD. Look at this rasterizer, for instance. It's comically inefficient on most hardware of the last decade. If this keeps up, optimal serial algorithms are going to become just academic ideals like Turing machines, never to be implemented.

You could say there's a back-and-forth between hardware and software, but to me it looks like software is playing catchup. "Oh I've got 16-wide vectors now? Ok let me go back and completely change everything." "What, I can't load a vector from an odd-numbered array position? Hmm, there goes THAT algorithm." The electrical engineers are running us.

The silicon just won't go any faster. What do you want the electrical engineers to do? Moore got you hooked on his junk and now his supply's been cut off. People tried to switch you to something more sustainable, i.e. anything but x86 and C, but you couldn't wait for your fix.

A real hacker should be happy that there are fresh new problems to solve. Or, if you just want to get shit done, use a dynamic language and be glad that CPU speed is rarely an issue any more.

Yes, but you'll notice that it hasn't been a onesided thing, the GPU and CPU have moved towards each other as it became clear that the general purpose problems that needed to be solved were addressed rather nicely by both.

It's a bit like reverse cell division.

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