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Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by klodolph on Monday April 25, 2016 @09:03PM (#11568674)
I would love it if someone could do something like this for modern GPUs, complete with pipeline stalls as a costumed CPU waits to hear back from a costumed GPU. It seems like there's an unreasonable amount of mystery around how GPUs work, at least in popular understanding, compared to our knowledge of arcane corners of obsolete computers.
Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by jtokoph on Monday April 25, 2016 @09:10PM (#11568695)
Isn't there a lot of mystery because the GPU companies keep things very secret? It's been my understanding that GPUs are very much black boxes.
Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by TD-Linux on Monday April 25, 2016 @10:22PM (#11568996)
Most popular desktop GPUs have been pretty well reverse engineered (or implemented from documentation) in Mesa, so you really can go and look at the nitty gritty details, and write assembly language if you so like.

The VC4 is also a fun target, because in addition to being supported in mesa, it is documented very well [1] and in a very popular product (the Raspberry Pi).

[1] http://www.broadcom.com/docs/support/videocore/VideoCoreIV-A...

Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by corysama on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @12:35AM (#11569465)
Here's dump of public knowledge about various GPUs.

http://renderingpipeline.com/graphics-literature/low-level-g...

Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by panic on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @12:08AM (#11569361)
This series of articles doesn't have any costumes, but it's still a good read: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...
Re:Let Chris Crawford teach you to program Atari's 8-bit com... by DonHopkins on Monday April 25, 2016 @11:20PM (#11569203)
Orchestrated to music like the Sorcerer's Apprentice [1]!

[1] No link necessary.