[jacobush]

Actually, not inherently serial. If you think about, an Apple consists of a lot of chips, which could be nicely modeled in say, Verilog, which is good for modelling parallel stuff. But it does not lend itself well to shader language.

[raphlinus]

To clarify: it does not lend itself well to ShaderToy, because the computational model is hamstrung by the fact that the threads can't communicate with each other within a draw call. On a more modern GPU platform with compute shaders, you get a lot more of that, and I think interesting things will happen. I'm personally really looking forward to WebGPU, as I think it will make a lot of this stuff much more accessible.

[Jasper_]

Unfortunately, after spending a lot of time in the committee, I think it's ultimately doomed. Chrome has WebGL-with-compute-shaders behind a flag. Really, they should have standardized and shipped that years ago.

[Narishma]

Even when you emulate the different chips in parallel, what usually kills performance is the synchronization between them.