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by jjoonathan
1773 days ago
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There's also the matter of branch divergence costing not only compute time, but programmer time, if the programming model is bad. Using SIMD primitives that force me to pack my own vectors and handle all the divergence edge cases manually makes me want to stab my eyes out. Trying to get "CPU-style" auto-vectorization engines to infer vector semantics from a fully scalar program makes me want to stab my eyes out. Using "GPU-style" (NVidia calls it SIMT) auto-vectorization, which infers vector semantics by sweeping a kernel input parameter, is a breath of fresh air. I get that hardware people want to focus on the hardware, not the programming interface, but the amount of good hardware that sank for want of a good programming interface is truly mind-blowing. Normally I wouldn't have expected 90% of an industry to repeatedly shoot itself in the foot for decades, but from an outsider's perspective that seems to be exactly what happened. |
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Microsoft was about 5 years too early on that one. No one understood its relevance when it first came out.