AMD's master plan to topple Intel - Back to the top on a radical GPU • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD's master plan to topple Intel - Back to the top on a radical GPU

#41

Post by sigil » Sun, Jul 10, 2011, 5:27 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #39

sigil wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if AMD were to introduce something purpose-built (eg, with a Matlab-like syntax), then that might compel devs who aren't assembly or GPU gurus to develop against this. Does anyone know if it's possible to program GPUs today without using a new, special purpose programming language? That would be the killer app for GPUs. I see your point about most languages not admitting auto-vectorization. But couldn't you tak…

> Does anyone know if it's possible to program GPUs today without using a new, special purpose programming language? That would be the killer app for GPUs. Haskell has an embedded domain specific language for it. (It's probably a monad.)

Hmm. Are you referring to this?

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/acc-cuda.pdf

Re: AMD's master plan to topple Intel - Back to the top on a radical GPU

#42

Post by irons » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:32 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #38

codedivine wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would you bet on? The only other players are RIM/Blackberry and WebOS and I am not too sure how well they will hold up.

RIM has much more marketshare in developed markets, and it can still turn things around. WebOS has a technology advantage over Microsoft's offering, but a bad starting point. Still, I would not rule HP out. But to be honest, I am not sure third place will be a significant thing. The mobile market is looking to repeat history with how things turned out on the desktop. Do we care much about third place there? Not reall…

I work in mobile software, and I don't know anyone who thinks "how things turned out on the desktop" is a good guide for the future. See also, http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/06/the-post-pc-era-will-be-a-m...

Re: AMD's master plan to topple Intel - Back to the top on a radical GPU

#43

Post by buzzzlight » Mon, Jul 11, 2011, 4:12 PM UTC

jallmann wrote: post #8

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I'd love to be able to go back to the diverse ecosystem we had in the 80's, but I don't see how an architecture that deviates significantly from the x86 norm could gain traction in this Windows world.

I don't think this is meant to replace the x86 ISA, but rather SIMD units like MMX/SSE and traditional GPU shaders. The article was a bit muddled -- I'm waiting for the Anandtech version. Successful adoption will be dependent on good tooling. Auto-vectorizing is really hard in compilers, mostly because current languages aren't really built for it. But if AMD were to introduce something purpose-built (eg, with a Matla…

Fellow programmers make fun of me for liking Matlab. I've tried to explain it to them many times (how it doesn't need iterators, how most things are one-liners, how it's 10-100 times less code all the way down), but I've come to the conclusion that they just feel threatened because it goes around most of the problems they've learned to solve with c. It's like how some auto mechanics don't think much of electric cars. I know that hundreds of cores is the future, but nobody knows how to use inherently parallel languages like Matlab, so all I can do right now is wait for the future to arrive.