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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

I’m very amused by the fact that this hardwares does not have hardware for some specialised operations that competitors do.

From the article, it would seem that compensating via software was fine (performance wise). Apple’s approach seems to be seems to break the norm in fields where the norm has proven to be unnecessary complexity. Which open tip room for just more raw performance.

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AMD has removed exactly the same hardware, and NVIDIA doesn't benefit much from the specialized vertex fetch hardware anymore, even specialized uniform buffer stuff is getting close to marginal benefit. Hardly unique to Apple.

Lots of what they do on the M1 is stuff that PowerVR was doing before (and apple's older GPUs were based on PowerVR's via a licensing deal). There are other vendors who have also ditched some of this stuff.

It's a smart move for Apple to double down on pruning hw features you don't think you need, but sadly you can only go all-in on it if you control the entire ecosystem.

As described in the article by not having fixed function units apple can put more regular floating point math units. These units can be used in many, for example when doing compute tasks or when doing 3d tasks that do not make use of those very focused use cases. In the end if it is a big perf hit for those approaches devs will just use different solutions as they need to developer explicitly for metal anyway.

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