Re:The chips are down for Moore’s law
by gnarbarian on Thursday February 11, 2016 @07:15AM
(#11079653)
Sure but OpenGL/OpenCL is a good counter example. We have an open standard tailored to a specialized style of architecture that is supported across vendors, competitive with closed/proprietary alternatives and beats the hell out of anything we could run on a CPU.
OpenGL, really? The graphics API that is to terribly unsuited to modern hardware that it spawned several replacement APIs (Apple Metal, Khronos Vulkan, DirectX 12, …) and that has been more in the way of than helping programmers for at least a decade before?
OpenGL is the perfect caution tale on what not to do when trying to make a hardware acceleration API.
Re:The chips are down for Moore’s law
by gnarbarian on Thursday February 11, 2016 @08:02AM
(#11079836)
Vulkan is next. Opengl dominated for quite a while. 10 years? after it beat glide. The hardware has changed enough to warrant a new standard which is where the gpgpu language explosion is coming from.
OpenGL dominated? Not anywhere where people had better alternatives. Windows/XBox had DirectX, other console makers had their own proprietary libraries.
What do you think is used on mobile.
DirectX on Windows Phone, Metal on iOS; and mobile GPU vendors are one of the driving forces behind Vulkan, as OpenGL (ES) is just too shitty to keep using.
I think this has been unfairly downvoted. It doesn't match accelerator hardware well, it's something of a historic path dependency because it was the only open API, and the one used by 3DFX for their "miniGL" drivers.
Which is actually bad, because it entrenches existing solutions and makes it harder to switch to new, better algorithms.
Just look at cryptography: Now that AES is hardware accelerated in desktop CPUs, ChaCha has been bumped down to "that one algorithm for mobile users with shitty CPUs" with little to no chance of gaining significant traction on other markets until Intel decides to add hardware acceleration for it, too.