Hacker News Reader

Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

To be a little more speculative . . . if it is on GPU, is there some way of using rendering operations? The 'hidden-surface problem' in graphics has been described as basically a sorting problem: so represent each number as a triangle Z . . . well, maybe it would not be very fast, but you could do a few million at once!

View on HN

Seven years ago, maybe. But today's GPUs do it easily in their programmable pipeline (shaders).

And where conditionals are costly, you can use tricks like:

    float temp = min(x, y);
    x = max(x, y);
    y = temp;

instead of the conditional swapping operations, to make the whole network sorting algorithm deterministic. (Edit: notice that min() and max() here are hardware operations.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com