Re:Why has CPU frequency ceased to grow? (2014)
by ajross on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @01:02PM
(#16431461)
> But it would be much better if a single language + hardware system emerged
There will, but it takes time. The world of scalar hardware in the 1970's was no less fragmented. Honestly most of the incompatibilities in the SIMD world at this point are bugs and not fundamental problems. The vector world has settled on a broad architecture at this point for most things.
Re:Why has CPU frequency ceased to grow? (2014)
by fulafel on Thursday February 22, 2018 @12:43AM
(#16435384)
Maybe. I feel is's at least equally likely that app dev perceived ROI on GPGPU will get worse due to relative slowdown in GPU advances and increasing parallel programming productivity on CPUs, and an attractive GPGPU platform won't emerge before it's irrelevant.
With the current fragmented and sometimes proprietary forest of programming platforms, an application needs to be quite specialized to warrant investment in GPU compute outside the original niche of graphics acceleration. There are other giant problems too, after you get over rewriting your application for numerous different platforms - atrocious quality of GPU drivers causing OS crashes for users, lack of any common way to debug GPU code, the colourful quality of compilers, the wildly different performance characteristics of different platforms necessitating per-platform algorithm changes, etc...
Consider what a minority of applications bother to even put in the work to exploit large amounts of CPU parallelism, which is vastly easier. There is after all >10x parallelism available on a typical PC CPU, after you count cores, threads and SIMD lanes.