71–80 of 144 posts
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I see us not getting rid of CPU, but CPU and GPU being eventually consolidated in one system of heterogeneous computing units.
CPU and GPU have very different ways of scheduling instructions, requiring somehow different interfaces and programming models.. I'd hazard to say that a GPU and CPU with unified memory access (like the Apple's M series, and most mobile chips) is already such a consolidated system.
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This CPU simulator does not attempt to achieve the maximum speed that could be obtained when simulating a CPU on a GPU. For that a completely different approach would be needed, e.g. by implementing something akin to qemu, where each CPU instruction would be translated into a graphic shader program. On many older GPUs, it is impossible or difficult to launch a graphic program from inside a graphic program (instead of…
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Once translated, the shader programs would be reused. All this could be inserted in qemu, where a CPU is emulated by generating for each instruction a short program that is compiled and then the resulting executable functions are cached and executed during the interpretation of the program for the emulated CPU.
In qemu, one could replace the native CPU compiler with a GPU compiler, either for CUDA or for a graphic shader language, depending on the target GPU. Then the compiled shaders could be loaded in the GPU memory, where, if the GPU is recent enough to support this feature, they could launch each other in execution.
Eventually, one might be able to use a modified qemu running on the CPU to bootstrap a qemu + a shader compiler that have been translated to run on the GPU, so that the entire simulation of a CPU is done on the GPU.
I don‘t understand why you would train a NN for an operation like sqrt that the GPU supports in silicon.
I see it as a practical joke or a fun hack, like CPUs implemented in the Game of Life, or in Minecraft.
Hey everyone thank you taking a look at my project. This was purely just a “can I do it” type deal, but ultimately my goal is to make a running OS purely on GPU, or one composed of learned systems.
Hey everyone thank you taking a look at my project. This was purely just a “can I do it” type deal, but ultimately my goal is to make a running OS purely on GPU, or one composed of learned systems.
A fun experiment but I wonder how many out there seriously think we could ever completely rid ourselves of the CPU. It seems to be a rising sentiment. The cost of communicating information through space is dealt with in fundamentally different ways here. On the CPU it is addressed directly. The actual latency is minimized as much as possible, usually by predicting the future in various ways and keeping the spatial ex…
This sentiment is not a recent thing. Ever since GPGPU became a thing, there have been people who first hear about it, don't understand processor architectures and get excited about GPUs magically making everything faster.
I vividly recall a discussion with some management type back in 2011, who was gushing about getting PHP to run on the new Nvidia Teslas, how amazingly fast websites will be!
Similar discussions also spring up around FPGAs again and again.
The more recent change in sentiment is a different one: the "graphics" origin of GPUs seem to have been lost to history. I have met people (plural) in recent years who thought (surprisingly long into the conversation) that I mean stable diffusion when talking about rendering pictures on a GPU.
Nowadays, the 'G' in GPU probably stands for GPGPU.
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I see us not getting rid of CPU, but CPU and GPU being eventually consolidated in one system of heterogeneous computing units.
Agreed. Much like “RISC is gonna replace everything” - it didn’t. Because the CPU makers incorporated lessons from RISC into their designs. I can see the same happening to the CPU. It will just take on the appropriate functionality to keep all the compute in the same chip. It’s gonna take awhile because Nvidia et al like their moats.
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Please tell me what you had in mind so I can try something different!
Begin reimplementing a subleq/muxleq VM with GPU primitive commands: https://github.com/howerj/muxleq (it has both, muxleq (multiplexed subleq, which is the same but mux'ing instructions being much faster) and subleq. As you can see the implementation it's trivial. Once it's compiled, you can run eforth, altough I run a tweked one with floats and some beter commands, edit muxleq.fth, set the float to 1 in that file w…
A fun experiment but I wonder how many out there seriously think we could ever completely rid ourselves of the CPU. It seems to be a rising sentiment. The cost of communicating information through space is dealt with in fundamentally different ways here. On the CPU it is addressed directly. The actual latency is minimized as much as possible, usually by predicting the future in various ways and keeping the spatial ex…