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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting this is targeting ML applications, so I don't think you'll be able to display even a text console with it for the foreseeable future.

But I love that this is even in the realm of possibilities! There's no reason we couldn't, in principle, have a small open-source GPU taping out on the free Skywater shuttle, and I am here for it!

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It's funny that we've gotten to the point that a "graphics-less GPU" is actually useful. Perhaps they should call it something else...

Like a “tensor processing unit” or TPU?

A RISC-V open source TPU would be a big innovation in AI and scientific computing.

We work on an open source tensor processing unit at https://tensil.ai. It is not RISC-V based since only a handful of very simple instructions is needed for expressing data flows typical in ML.

I feel like the name’s been funny for a decade and a half, and a new name might be coming, but GPU has been pretty synonymous with massively parallel vector/SIMD processor for a long time, right? Most still have some dedicated graphics functionality, but people have also been using them for high performance headless compute for quite a while. I certainly prefer just GPU over GPGPU. It seems hard to change though, and might be confusing to call it a vector processor, considering CPUs have vector/SIMD support. So what would be a better name?

GPUs without graphics support are already a thing. But so far, NVIDIA is staying on the GPU term.

For the H100, very minimalistic FF support was picked.

Only two TPCs in both the SXM5 and PCIe H100 GPUs are graphics-capable (that is, they can run vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders). And that’s out of:

8 GPCs, 66 TPCs, 2 SMs/TPC, 132 SMs per GPU

for an H100 SXM5.

Aka just for compatibility.

Well there are definitely cases where you want to render frames and not view them in real time. For example, rendering the final cut of an animated movie.

It's only a matter of time before GPU gets backronym-ed to General Processing Unit or something similarly wacky.

GPPU

Here's what looks like one meant for actual video output, from over a decade ago and I'm not sure if the project made much progress either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19724986

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