Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com...
by maxerickson on Thursday August 23, 2018 @10:26AM
(#17827498)
I didn't highlight it as a desirable 3d processor, I pointed it out because 3d was essentially becoming default at that point.
And the first iPhone shipping with a powerful graphics chip is a counter to your argument that the future of mobile wasn't clear. The people with the ideas wanted a graphics processor.
Re:Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Com...
by angry_octet on Friday August 24, 2018 @12:27AM
(#17832797)
The fact that the entire industry apart from Apple (a computer company, not a phone/device company) were completely ignoring 3D exactly shows that it was NOT obvious or clear. After Apple demonstrated the potential it became clear.
But, to clarify, I was speaking of consumer/mobile. The original iPhone was quite revolutionary for having a decent PowerVR graphics chip. High end symbian phones just had a CPU. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110_Navigator or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr2
Even though GPGPU was already big in 2008, people still thought of it as a difficult to use coprocessor for big compute jobs. Much as people consider FPGAs now.