Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989)

Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by jacquesm on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @04:23AM (#21003323)

The Novix was crazy fast when it landed. I had access to one of the first samples and we had to sign all kinds of stuff to get our hands on one. Rumor had it that it was part of what went into the Tomahawk, but I've never been able to substantiate that. I used it for image processing.

The later versions of the same software ran on regular x86 hardware, which caught up pretty quickly with custom processors. I had a DSP032 which also ended up in the drawer because of the speed with which regular processors improved.

Interesting that now, a good 30 years later we are again using co-processors.

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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by kjs3 on Thursday September 19, 2019 @12:43PM (#21017955)

I think it was Joel McCormack who wrote a paper (context: X11 display servers) that basically said that in the long run, dumb frame buffers were probably better than dedicated graphics processors. He reasoned the general purpose processor guys were improving performance faster than the dedicated GPU folks were able to due to greater scale and resources. They were therefore able (eventually) to perform the same graphics primitives just as fast as the GPUs, and were using up all of the memory bandwidth anyway.

That doesn't seem to be as true any more, and there were always corner cases (e.g. hardware accelerated mice sprites, I think, were always a win for various reasons), but it was an interesting debate back in the day.

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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by jacquesm on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:11AM (#21024303)

That all changed when high level primitives and floating point operations were moved to the graphics co-processor. SIMD at that level was a game changer. I wrote a graphics driver for the BBC Micro to use the Elektor 'GDP' as an output device, it totally blew the 8 bit CPU of the day out of the water.

These things tend to oscillate, presumably one day there will be another generation of CPUs that is much closer to our current CPU/GPU combo that will outperform GPUs and then the cycle will start over again.

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Re:Stack Computers: 4.4 Architecture of the Novix NC4016 (1989) by kjs3 on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:31PM (#21030951)

it totally blew the 8 bit CPU of the day out of the water

I think the counterargument in this context would be "...until we all went to 16-bit processors.". But I understand the point you're making.

These things tend to oscillate

I think you're of course correct, and I don't think the original paper disputes that. What I think (without much research) has happened is that the period of that oscillation has dramatically expanded since the paper was written.

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