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Comment by AlexCoventry | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.

It's as awesome as you imagine: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/

Imagine a GPU based on 512 of these, with each unit responsible for rasterizing a 128×128 pixel subsection of a 4K frame.

I don't think that would make a very good GPU as it wouldn't fit the data model well [1] as the instructions and data need to share the same bus which would mess up streaming.

Your suggestion is closer to a grid computer but even then I don't think an unmodified 6502 would be a great choice because the memory model (or lack thereof) would really restrict performance.

[1] https://booksite.elsevier.com/9780124077263/downloads/advanc...

Surely the beowulf cluster was a better idea :)

Intel did entertain a similar thought for a while, as far as I can understand: https://semiaccurate.com/2012/08/28/intel-details-knights-co...

I get that it was mostly a joke. :)

The LAN controller used to make the Beowulf cluster would probably have more compute (and memory) than the 6502 itself.

The Intel cores in the linked article have a distinct L1 data and instruction caches inside them, and associated L2 caches, which makes a big difference in comparison to the 6502.

Dreamcast hardware did this sort of "tiled" rendering if I recall correctly.

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/#archite...

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