On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 6:26 AM, Bert Freudenberg <[email protected]>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 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] Cheers, Z-Bo [1] I'm not an expert in graphics, so this is just really punditry.
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