Re:It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
by phendrenad2 on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @04:37PM
(#28385247)
> when idle, a smartphone OS could power off not just the screen, but also CPU, RAM, and a few other components, and downscale itself to the slowest and the most power efficient core in the system
Don't the proprietary versions already do that, though?
Re:It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
by Const-me on Wednesday September 01, 2021 @05:17PM
(#28385623)
I don’t think they do. They switch to very low power states, on big.little systems they power off half of the CPU cores. But some CPU cores, and all of the RAM are still powered, the main OS doesn’t have other place to live.
With different OS design it might be possible to power off more components of the phone when idle, while being able to wake up fast enough.
I remember how it was with programmable GPUs.
When programmable shaders were introduced in GeForce 3 (2001), nobody really understood what to do with them. The consensus was that it’s incredibly hard to write custom shaders. OpenGL consortium refused to support shaders for almost a decade (GLSL 1.0 released in 2008), that’s one of the reasons of the success of Direct3D https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/88055
Yet look at them after 20 years of evolution. People no longer coding shaders in assembly, we have quite a few higher-level languages for them. People have built better APIs to interface with programmable GPUs, both low level close to metal (D3D12, Metal, Vulkan) and high-level (CUDA, TensorFlow, game engines). People built debuggers and profilers for these shaders. Overall, people embraced programmable GPUs, leaned to use them, and the results are amazing. Visual quality of games and other real-time 3D skyrocketed, despite the increase of pixel count and density in the displays.
I can see how the same path is possible for the rest of the programmable chips and pieces inside modern computers.
> and the benefit is very slim
Better products in very broad sense. For instance, when idle, a smartphone OS could power off not just the screen, but also CPU, RAM, and a few other components, and downscale itself to the slowest and the most power efficient core in the system.