On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 6:06 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
i'm also talking to jeff from nyuzi, he designed a software-driven "compute engine that happens to be reasonably good at 3D", the interesting bit being that he's focussed on working out which areas need performance improvements. this is something that's almost completely lacking in the published academic world... *because nobody in the academic world has designed and published a GPU!*
we worked out that nyuzi is approximately 1/16th the speed of MALI400. roughly. although area-for-area it's quite hard to tell whether that's a fair assessment because you can't *get* die areas for MALI400 (anyone know anything better than these estimates? https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1176110/ ) and it's the performance / mm^2 / watt that's critical, we worked out that if you put in 2 nyuzi cores and managed to halve the number of instructions / pixel by replacing critical path blocks with hardware-rendering ones, you'd end up at about 25% the performance of MALI400 and that i feel would be "good enough" for a first version. i'd be interested to hear what people think, here.
That would by no means be enough. We need video decoding blocks, without those the SoC is as good as an rpi for e.g. the education market that you have mentioned and I'm sure not interested personally on using a system as a desktop/laptop that can't play videos without stuttering while potentially doing something else at the same time. And I'm not even talking about games here. I don't know if there is a simd extension on the cpu cores that someone can write a real time decoder for and hook it up to whatever's needed for firefox etc to automatically redirect to( not that that's an easy thing), but 25% of an outdated low performance gpu sounds really low to me. What's the point of having such an awesome low power core if we can't use the thermal envelope for pushing graphics?
the *general-purpose compute* performance of nyuzi on the other hand is really good.
What is gpgpu used on desktops right now for?