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Comment by bmurphy1976 | Hacker News Reader

bmurphy1976

Normally this wouldn't feel so ground breaking, but the stars are in alignment and all these improvements are hitting at the same time. We're seeing years of work and investment paying off (AMD, Apple, ARM, Nvidia, Amazon), new process nodes (TSMC), and new tech (Ray Tracing, DLSS, machine learning) all hitting at the same time.

And that's the big stuff! There's also the steady incremental improvements such as battery technology, SSD and RAM that are ongoing.

You also have an incumbent (Intel) who's lost their way. If they were as scrappy as they were 15 years ago this wouldn't feel like such a banner year.

Yeah, I think we are in a new era of computing.

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Not to forget that apparently some of the people driving that scrappy team that had a big part in Intel's resurgence has been working on the M1.

This actually reminded me of how I got skeptical comments from people when I told them that my small and scrappy Pentium-M (P-M -> M1, HAH!) based laptop was almost as fast as their desktop P4 monsters in compiling code.

The P4 (and Netburst in general) was a true low-point for Intel. Intel is struggling with fab issues right now, but things were really bad from about '02 to '06, with the P4 not completely going away until '08.

I remember people using socket adapters to put Pentium M chips on their desktop. I also have very bad memories of my P4 Prescott around the same era. What an absolute trash pile of an architecture.

It wasn't actually that bad... Everyone likes to remember it as this massively power hungry beast with terrible performance. It was power hungry compared to what came later, but it did also provide some pretty good performance at the time - especially if you were the kind of tweaky nutter who liked to overclock.

Northwood was a relative bargain when you cranked the bus clocks up well beyond what it said on the box.

Ray Tracing

I'm not someone into the inner-working of chips much, but is "ray tracing" a new term used for something in microprocessors now? Or is this the same graphic "ray tracing" we were doing back in the 80's on Amigas and Atari STs?

The latter. Systems have become fast enough recently to do realtime ray tracing.

I did not read it as a list of technologies used in chip fabrication, but as a list of “killer apps” driving the need for more performance.

The new ray tracing is being done in real time rather than being baked into the scenes.

Realtime ray-tracing is a mix of hardware acceleration for ray intersections and de-noising. The de-noising approaches are certainly novel and not really analogous to previous methods, imho, though the accelerated bounding box hierarchies for accelerating intersections certainly appear in previous iterations.

I think this is the key answer, de-noising, using various neural techniques finally allowed acceptable images to be produced from sometimes <1 ray / pixel, where normally images produced at such densities were nearly unusable.

This is still not perfect and many ray tracing techniques rely on accumulation over time which limits certain images from working (I imagine raytracing a small particle cloud, or fast shifting objects to be a worst case scenarios)

its a common enough workload that dedicated hardware for it has emerged, and software written to utilize that hardware is becoming more common place.

We're crossing the threshold this year where real-time ray tracing in hardware isn't just some theoretical concept, it's actually useful and available in affordable consumer hardware (NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as the PS5 and new Xbox all have it).

Yes, the NVIDIA 2xxx RTX series had it two years ago, but this is the year where it's actually viable and not so gimmicky.

It's also shipping in consoles this generation, which is going to drive a lot more games to actually implement it. When it's only being used by 5% of the PC userbase, maybe you don't bother doing that work. If cheaper GPUs can push that up to say 20% of PCs next year, you still might not.

But when every PS5 and XSX has raytracing hardware, suddenly it makes sense. That's going to be helpful for getting it supported in PC titles sooner.

We've been able to do realtime ray tracing in software since forever though and the shadertoys and whatnot have been full of hardware accelerated demos, that's not so interesting.

I remember playing with a number of demos on my intel core 2 duo macbook (not pro) a decade ago.

The new GPUs have hardware specifically designed to do the type of math that raytracing does, such as ray/volume intersections, faster or more efficiently than generic shader hardware. Sufficient quantity (FLOPS) can become a quality of its own.

They weren't doing that in hardware real time accelerated at 4k resolution in AAA games. This year they are. That's a big leap from your core 2 duo demos.

It's the same graphical ray tracing, although with many modern improvements like path tracing for randomization of the ray bounces to efficiently approximate and converge on the correct lighting, and ML-powered denoising and upscaling algorithms that take low-resolution fast rendering and transform it to higher quality and detail.

Intel in 2020 is IBM in 1980.

So in 2060 it will still be a huge company with $20B in revenue?

Past performance does not indicate future performance, but there are plenty of reasons to think Intel might be around for some time to come.

>>So in 2060 it will still be a huge company with $20B in revenue?

That's great for shareholders.

Meanwhile, keep in mind that IBM exited the consumer computing device market. If that's also in store for Intel then it's a bit pointless in the PoV of those in the market for consumer computing devices.

That'd be quite a decline, last year Intel reported $72B in revenue...

Yeah. When I'm guessing how long something will last, I guess it's about halfway through its life unless I have really good information to the contrary. Intel was founded in 1968, so let's say it will shut down in 2072 (give or take...many...years). And Fortune 500 companies don't seem to totally shrink back to startup head count and revenue even when they go bankrupt—they might have significant revenue but even more expenses. So it seems pretty reasonable to guess Intel will be around with (at least) $20B of revenue in 2060, in spite of their rough patch today.

> When I'm guessing how long something will last, I guess it's about halfway through its life

That is called Lindy effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

As soon as they switch to a services business.

No Intel is back to 2002 with it p4. Give them a year or 2 and they are back with a new cpu. Don't forget that they have enough in their r&d pockets.

That's what I thought 3 years ago. It hasn't happened.

Overlooking much of TSMC and Current Intel Fabs issues.

And yet everything still feels slower after every year lol.

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