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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

> with mobile being actually much more important than desktop

How so?

I always thought the more common use case for GPU acceleration on the web for mobile were 2D games (Candy crush etc). Even on low end devices these are already plenty fast with something like Pixi, no?

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We live in a bubble where we don't notice it, but desktop as a platform is... not dying exactly, but maybe returning to 90s levels of popularity. Common enough, but something tech-minded people use, and not necessarily for everybody. Mobile is rapidly becoming the ubiquitous computing paradigm we all thought desktop computers would be. In that world, WebGPU is much more important on mobile than on desktop.

I genuinely think personal computing has been severely hamstrung over the past decade+ due to the race to be all-encompassing. Not everything has to be for everyone. It's ok to focus on tools that only appeal to other people in tech. It really is.

Desktop is pretty much alive, it is called laptops.

My Thinkpad P80 + docking station doesn't own anything to classical desktops.

A chromebook, internally, is more a mobile device than a "real" computer. Plenty of high school kids today will own their first real computer when they go to college. Until then, most of their computing is done their iPhone or iPad, and perhaps their school-issued chromebook.

We see this issue with kids of their generation entering the workforce with a lack of basic computer skills, or CS students in college who have to be explained the concept of a hierarchical file/directory structure.

Chromebooks are only relevant in US school system, and even then, there is Crostini.

Most schools around the world don't issue laptops to students.

> A chromebook, internally, is more a mobile device than a "real" computer

How is that? And if so how am I typing this on an Intel i5 Chromebook with 16G RAM that is hosting a Linux VM? If upgradeability is the issue, Framework's Chromebook is completely upgradeable.

Many, many more people own smartphones than laptops.

Most don't work on their smartphones.

In general, WebGL has more CPU overhead under the hood than WebGPU, so the same rendering workload may be more energy efficient when implemented with WebGPU, even if the GPU is essentially doing the same work.

Thanks. Good point.

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