Re:Browser Bloat (1996)
by dietrichepp on Tuesday August 30, 2016 @02:50AM
(#12388016)
Why do you say that the GPU has a "very CISC instruction set"? The RISC/CISC divide is a somewhat historical notion, and GPUs don't really seem to fall in either camp to me (separate load/store + tons of GPRs + VLIW = RISC-like, transcendental functions + texture fetch with interpolation = CISC-like).
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I was taking a bit of poetic license there; what I meant is that the ABI that the GPU presents to the CPU contains a number of high-level instructions that must be further decoded within the GPU, in the same way that modern "CISC-presenting" processors decode CISC ops into RISC μops.
That's only for graphics programming, mind you; the GPGPU interface is pretty directly representative of the GPU's internal RISC execution strategy.