On Jul 26, 2011, at 6:34 AM, John Zabroski wrote: > > > On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 6:26 AM, Bert Freudenberg <b...@freudenbergs.de> > wrote: > On 26.07.2011, at 02:17, John Zabroski wrote: > > > 99% of the chip space on GPUs these days is devoted to 3D, and chip space > > for 2D primitives have shrunk expontentially in the last 15 years. > > Graphics hardware nowadays has (almost?) no fixed-function parts anymore. It > turned into a general-purpose SIMD coprocessor. > > - Bert - > > The state of the art in linear algebra is such that a general-purpose SIMD > coprocessor IS the hardware interface for 3D abstraction.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Just because 3D today increasingly targets general-purpose SIMD coprocessors doesn't imply that those SIMD coprocessors are only suitable for 3D. Unlike your original assertion, when doing 2D you'll still be using all of those SIMD elements (99% of the chip won't be idle). > > This could change in the future to be more general purpose. For example, > hardware-based computations using quaternions and octonions. As far as I am > aware, it isn't done today for purely mathematical reasons; no one knows how. > And as far as I'm aware, such a mathematical breakthrough would be huge, but > not something graphics vendors would pursue/fund, since it is "basic > research" that can't be patented and so all graphics processors would get the > same speedup. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion Given two quaternions, it's trivial to write a GPU program to compute eg: their Hamilton product. I'm not sure what you mean by "hardware-based quaternions"... quaternions are an algebraic entity whose defining products are easily and naturally implementable on a SIMD. Cheers, Josh > > Cheers, > Z-Bo > > [1] I'm not an expert in graphics, so this is just really punditry. > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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