The first GPU came out twenty one years ago. Why on Earth do you think all of a sudden we're going to get something we've never gotten before?

The RISC-V community is already working on GPUs, some of them open:

https://github.com/felsabbagh3/Vortex https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492902 https://libre-riscv.org/3d_gpu/

Doesn’t look that good to me. The Vortex is not a GPU. They call it GPGPU, meant purely for running OpenCL kernels, doesn’t have a graphics pipeline at all, which is kinda important part of a GPU.

I am not so sure about that. GPU has been slowly moving away from having a fixed graphics pipline at all in the past a few years. See the recent Nanite technology from Unreal 5: http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2020/05/some-thoughts-on-unreal...

They use compute shaders for triangles that cover 1 pixel as rasterization always does 2x2 due to derivative calculations etc so there is overhead. For larger triangles they do go trough the rasterization pipeline as usual because it is so much faster.

Another crucial thing is texture mapper. That thing is really fast and usable even in the compute pipeline. Image support is (was?) largely optional in OpenCL.

Also I remember the last time people talked about this. PS3 was not originally supposed to have a GPU at all because the Cell processor was so powerful. In the end they had to ram in an actual GPU. While the Cell was just fine for vertex processing it did choke terribly in rasterization due to lack of TMU and dedicated HW rasterizer.

EDIT: I also want to emphasize the difference of target markets. On AMD one can go to the Nanite path for some of the rasterization. One must remember that it is a non battery powered device.

Memory bandwidth is really power hungry. For mobile, the likely target market for the Vortex and similar, one really wants to do tile based rendering. Ideally the way IMG does it. Even though theoretical flops of modern mobile GPU’s is higher than some old discrete ones their memory bandwidths are way lower, so no running Crysis on modern mobile even though flops would indicate it would match a good discrete GPU back in the days.

See also: https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor

> The first GPU came out twenty one years ago. Why on Earth do you think all of a sudden we're going to get something we've never gotten before?

'21 years ago we got a new thing. Why on Earth do you think we're going to get something new ever again?'

I think people are missing the sarcasm... at least I hope that's sarcasm.

It's not at all sarcasm. What's different now?

Wait, you really don't see the contradiction between your first and second sentences?

'21 years ago we got yet another new thing. What makes you think we'll ever get a new thing again?'

Seriously?

Expired patents

Sorry, walk me through this. There was a competitive field of GPUs. Somehow the companies were able to produce hardware. Are you saying that someone controlled the defining patents, and all of the competitors were forced to license from them?

Citation needed.

Currently the GPU market consists of companies that have been working on GPUs for decades. Companies that are starting right now have failed to design GPUs. This includes very big players, like Intel, Apple and Huawei. This is likely because all the important ways to produce GPUs have been patented, and there's only so many ways to create an efficient GPU. Even if you try to create your own GPU by poaching engineers from existing GPU companies (like Apple tried), those engieers are only familiar with methods that were already patented and you have no way around this even if you have Apple's tremendous resources to throw at the problem. So the only way to create an open source GPU is to use patents that already expired. Such a GPU might be 15-20 years behind current technology, but that's still a GPU.