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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed the video but a lot of it sounded more like advertising than technical information to me. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to watching the Asahi folks crack this stuff open.

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It is an overview of what is new about their hardware and technical advice (but not overly technical) on how to maximize the GPUs performance.

I watched the full video and thought it was excellent. I wish other CPU/GPU manufacturers made technical overview videos like this. I've never programmed graphics targeting metal before, but I feel much more inclined after watching this so I guess it was good advertising.

I didn't watch too many developer conference, but IHMO the Apple WWDC sessions are fairly easy and enjoyable for learning. especially they provide full transcript.

Maybe it is my former graphics background, but I find GTC videos from NVidia and their developer site quite understandable, as AMD GPUOpen as well.

Have you dived into them?

I think it's important to understand that this video is aimed at a broad audience of developers. Obviously some of them are GPU experts but a lot of people are quite literally app developers who are going to watch this video as an introduction to "hmm everyone keeps telling about this GPU thing, what can I do with it?" So the video has to provide them with some context they can use to explore more.

It's one of ̶W̶W̶D̶C̶ developer sessions. Some of them at WWDC are basic 101 introduction for rookies.

There are advanced (for me) sessions like:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10127/

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10042/

Although it's true that they won't discuss at hardware level.

How can it be a WWDC session if it's referring to hardware only announced a few weeks ago?

Yes, It's my fault. The website uses the same layout with WWDC sessions, so I misunderstand it :/

> On the other hand, I'm looking forward to watching the Asahi folks crack this stuff open.

It will still be years before it is practical for Linux developers to target these features. Eventually, the rate of change in GPU design will slow and Linux will catch up once and for all. But it's hard to not drool over the hardware that proprietary OSs get to use today.

What's not technical about it? It tells you what the new advancements in the M3/A17 GPUs are, what you should look out for, and how you can take advantage of them. It provides enough information so you can understand what technical tradeoffs you need to make when you target M3 / A17 GPUs. E.g. Register pressure is a real concern in large shaders, and this helps explain how the behavior would be different under a dynamic allocation scheme. It explains how the ray tracing acceleration works, and how it reorders the different intersection calls and how you should avoid intersection queries.

There are some hyperbole interjected about how incredible the performance is but that's only in between the useful data. (I did chuckle at the… enthusiasm of the speaker though)

This isn't a technical document for GPU designers. Apple doesn't really need or want you to understand exactly how the implementation works because that's basically trade secret for them. This is aimed at letting app / game developers know how they should optimize for the new GPUs, since previously Apple just made some ambiguous remarks about some of these new technology ("Dynamic Caching") without explaining what they meant.

But yes, I do like how the Asahi folks tend to end up documenting a lot of how these hardware works, but they also only have public information like this to start from so these are still useful info to have for them.

it literally has code and diagrams of how to organize SIMD instructions to fill out all the shader cores

The beginning does sound like marketing but eventually it gets into technical information.

I'd say the beginning sounds like an introduction to GPU architectures in general, not marketing.

Somewhere in the ballpark of 5:30-6:00 or so it describes prior hardware design of the Apple's shader core, and starting 7:00 it goes into hardware design of the new M3/A17Pro shader core. It's actually surprisingly detailed, e.g. Nvidia's whitepapers provide less detail on the actual organization of their SMs.

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