> You know what they found out with all of the hundreds of millions of dollars > they spent? Dedicated hardware still does it faster and cheaper. Period. > It's just like writing a custom routine to sort an array will pretty much > always be faster than using the generic qsort. When you hand-tune for a > specific data set you will always get better performance. This is not to > say that the generic implementation will not perform well or even acceptably > well, but only to say that it will never, ever, ever perform better.
Here you are comparing different algorithms. A custom sort algorithm will perform much better than a standard qsort. I agree. Implementing something in hardware does not mean it uses a more efficient algorithm however. A hardware implementation is just that, an implementation. It does not change the underlying algorithms that are being used. In fact, it tends to set the algorithm in stone. This makes it very hard to adopt new better algorithms as they are invented. In order to move to a better algorithm you must wait for a hardware manufacturer to implement it and then fork out more money. Dedicated hardware can do a limited set of things faster. There is no way to increase its capabilities without purchasing new hardware. This is the weakness of having dedicated hardware for very specific functionality. If a better algorithm is invented, it can take an extremely long time for it to be brought to market, if it is at all, and it will cost yet more money. Software has the advantage of being able to implement new algorithms much more quickly. If a new algorithm is found to be that much better than the old, a software implementation of this algorithm will in fact outperform a hardware implementation of the older algorithm. Algorithms are at least an order of magnitude more important than the implementation itself. -Raystonn _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
