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by pierreyoda 1261 days ago
This is an excellent link, well known in the "community" around this.

To add to it, here's a famous and really clear sub-2 minutes representation of the scales involved if it helps make things clearer, for those who've never seen the scales involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 (and that's "just" the Game of Life in the Game of Life).

I think I would enjoy helping push the state of the art in this field, but it's far beyond my abilities for the moment - which may never change without years of research in my free time, which I cannot realistically do before I'm retired basically.

If it wasn't, I would love to work on a new library specifically built for the kind of things like your idea, with the API aimed at working with metapixels-based "hardware", but with the lowest-level constructs (maybe by far) being thinks like RAM or CPU caches as building blocks - while still being able to zoom to the lowest level of cells in the renderer. But it's basically R&D and HPC combined if one wants to offer an interesting alternative to the established libraries.

From what I know of upcoming hardware, such a library may have to wait a couple of years and basically target (as in, full buy-in, maybe at the programming language-level, certainly in tooling) the next Apple Silicon-like (or beyond) breakthough in commonly accessible hardware for a nice, "free" performance boost. Maybe GPUs are next?

1 comments

side note, the TPU acronym is already taken by tensor processing units so Tetris GPUs will have to be something else…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_processing_unit

That's really interesting, I did not know about that, thanks for the link ! It's highly specific but could make a lot of cool "wow-effect" products or software suddenly viable, especially if it percolates to your average consumer hardware some way or another.