You probably won't get this performance when webgpu is finalized. It has to add bounds and sanity checks. It's unclear how much worse the perf will be.
Memory operations in modern GPUs basically evolved from fetching textures (which intrinsically have bounds checking built in, they have a width and height). All modern desktop GPUs (and probably mobile GPUs these days) use "descriptors" for textures and buffers which specify both address and size. Out of range fetches from a buffer return 0 and out of range writes are no operations.
There have been some GPUs in the past that could literally write to any address in main memory (famously the GPU in the XBox360 could do this), but its not true of any modern GPU as far as I know.
On a different note, 900 GFlops from a GPU is not really that impressive. Desktop GPUs reached this kind of performance nearly 10 years ago, but I guess its not bad for a first generation new design.
To get that kind of performance nearly 10 years ago in a desktop GPU, I bet you would need a whole lot of dollars, watts, and cube inches.
It is impressive unless you compare apples to oranges.
Plus, on bare metal it reaches 2.6 TFLOPs already.
Not all computers are Macs and at €1000 starting price, it's the entry level Mac but by no means an entry level computer.
Entry level computers are in the €400 ballpark (i5/4500U, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD).
For €1000 you could get a pretty strong gaming computer which is by no means entry level.
https://www.apple.com/at/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air
Not saying you can't find it under that on some promotion somewhere but that really depends on market timing and on where you live.
For example in Austria you can't find it under €999 and that's definitely not entry level money as Apple's entry level comes at a premium and is not representative of the entire PC market entry level.
That being said, I agree with all you said.
Now add the rest of the components and the prices, wattage and size shoots up exactly as described.
Yeah, compared to modern desktop GPUs, which can hit probably 20-30 times this, it's not that impressive. That being said, they're also consuming 20-30 times the power.
Safari makes it substantially easier to enable WebGPU than Chrome does (requiring a canary version and flags), which leads me to believe there's already some security mechanisms in place. But, time will tell!
Shame as I wanted to see what happened if I pitted my desktop against it. Of course it's likely the WebGPU implementations between browsers are not equivalent from a performance point of view.
More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022962
The summary exists in two variants: a graphic summary[1] and a textual one[2].
[1] https://kvark.github.io/webgpu-debate/SPIR-V.component.html
Still valuable.
Firefox also raises the same error. It looks like Safari implements a former version of the WebGPU draft[1] where Chrome and Firefox implement a more recent one.
[1] :https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/#dictdef-gpubindgrouplayoute...