At what point do the OEMs begin to realize they don’t have to follow the current mindset of attaching a GPU to a PC and instead sell what looks like a GPU with a PC built into it?
In this video Jeff is interested in GPU accelerated tasks like AI and Jellyfin. His last video was using a stack of 4 Mac Studios connected by Thunderbolt for AI stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4_RsUxRjKU
The Apple chips have both power CPU and GPU cores but also have a huge amount of memory (512GB) directly connected unlike most Nvidia consumer level GPUs that have far less memory.
Right now, sure. There's a reason why chip manufacturers are adding AI pipelines, tensor processors, and 'neural cores' though. They believe that running small local models are going to be a popular feature in the future. They might be right.
They were a pretty big deal back in ~2010, and I have to admit I didn't know that Tegra was powering Nintendo Switch.
To this day, it's the best mobile/Android device I ever owned. I don't know if it was the fastest, but it certainly was the best performing one I ever had. UI interactions were smooth, apps were fast on it, screen was bright, touch was perfect and still had long enough battery backup. The device felt very thin and light, but sturdy at the same time. It had a pleasant matte finish and a magnetic cover that lasted as long as the device did. It spolied the feel of later tablets for me.
It had only 1 GB RAM. We have much more powerful SoCs today. But nothing ever felt that smooth (iPhone is not considered). I don't know why it was so. Perhaps Android was light enough for it back then. Or it may have had a very good selection and integration of subcomponents. I was very disappointed when Nvidia discontinued the Tegra SoC family and tablets.
It leaves one to wonder what could be if they had any appetite for devices more in the consumer realm of things.
While the PCs were still displaying text, or if you were lucky to own an Hercules card, gray text, or maybe a CGA one, with 4 colours.
While the Amigas, which I am more confortable with, were doing this in the mid-80's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Px-ZkObTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A
The original Amiga 1000, had on its motherboard, later reduced to fit into an Amiga 500,
Motorola 68000 CPU, a programmable sounds chip with DMA channels (Paula), and a programable blitter chip (Agnus aka early GPUs).
You would build in RAM the audio, or graphics instructions for the respetive chipset, set the DMA parameters, and let them lose.
What it offered you was a page of memory where each byte value mapped to a character in ROM. You feed in your text and the controller fetches the character pixels and puts them on the display. Later we got ASCII box drawing characters. Then we got sprite systems like the NES, where the Picture Processing Unit handles loading pixels and moving sprites around the screen.
Eventually we moved on to raw framebuffers. You get a big chunk of memory and you draw the pixels yourself. The hardware was responsible for swapping the framebuffers and doing the rendering on the physical display.
Along the way we slowly got more features like defining a triangle, its texture, and how to move it, instead of doing it all in software.
Up until the 90s when the modern concept of a GPU coalesced, we were mainly pushing pixels by hand onto the screen. Wild times.
The history of display processing is obviously a lot more nuanced than that, it's pretty interesting if that's your kind of thing.
We have had the opposite problem for 35+ years at this point. The newer architecture machines like the Apple machines, the GB10, the AI 395+ do share memory between GPU and CPU but in a different way, I believe.
I'd argue with memory becoming suddenly much more expensive we'll probably see the opposite trend. I'm going to get me one of these GB10 or Strix Halo machines ASAP because I think with RAM prices skyrocketing we won't be seeing more of this kind of thing in the consumer market for a long time. Or at least, prices will not be dropping any time soon.
[0] - Not fully correct, as there are/were extensions cards that override the bus, thus replacing one of the said chips, on Amiga case.
It would take a lot of work to make a GPU do current CPU type tasks, but it would be interesting to see how it changes parallelism and our approach to logic in code.
HN isn't always very rational about voting. It will be a loss if you judge any idea on their basis.
> It would take a lot of work to make a GPU do current CPU type tasks
In my opinion, that would be counterproductive. The advantage of GPUs is that they have a large number of very simple GPU cores. Instead, just do a few separate CPU cores on the same die, or on a separate die. Or you could even have a forest of GPU cores with a few CPU cores interspersed among them - sort of like how modern FPGAs have logic tiles, memory tiles and CPU tiles spread out on it. I doubt it would be called a GPU at that point.
> If you look at your typical phone or laptop SoC, the CPU is only a small part.
Keep in mind that the die area doesn't always correspond to the throughput (average rate) of the computations done on it. That area may be allocated for a higher computational bandwidth (peak rate) and lower latency. Or in other words, get the results of a large number of computations faster, even if it means that the circuits idle for the rest of the cycles. I don't know the situation on mobile SoCs with regards to those quantities.
In mobile SoCs a good chunk of this is power efficiency. On a battery-powered device, there's always going to be a tradeoff to spend die area making something like 4K video playback more power efficient, versus general purpose compute
Desktop-focussed SKUs are more liable to spend a metric ton of die area on bigger caches close to your compute.
Also you'd need to add extra hardware for various OS support functions (privilege levels, address space translation/MMU) that are currently missing from the GPU. But the idea is otherwise sound, you can think of the 'Mill' proposed CPU architecture as one variety of it.
Perhaps I should have phrased it differently. CPU and GPU cores are designed for different types of loads. The rest of your comment seems similar to what I was imagining.
Still, I don't think that enhancing the GPU cores with CPU capabilities (OOE, rings, MMU, etc from your examples) is the best idea. You may end up with the advantages of neither and the disadvantages of both. I was suggesting that you could instead have a few dedicated CPU cores distributed among the numerous GPU cores. Finding the right balance of GPU to CPU cores may be the key to achieving the best performance on such a system.
Also, I'd say if you buy for example a Macbook with an M4 Pro chip, it is already is a big GPU attached to a small CPU.
As for how the HW looks like we already know. Look at Strix Halo as an example. We are just getting bigger and bigger integrated GPUs. Most of the flops on that chip is the GPU part.
Anyway, we're still stuck with "G" for "graphics" so it all doesn't make much sense and I'm actually looking for a vendor that takes its mission more seriously.
In the sense that the RAM is fully integrated, anyways.