[jiehong]

> what is raw assembly? can't understand it? that's the point!

Raw assembly vs cooked assembly?

Also, I think this attitude wasn’t the most common on CPUs, and people used to write assembly by hand just fine (and sometimes some still do). I think we shouldn’t be afraid of assembly like that.

Compilers could write that assembly in the end, just like the do for CPUs!

[yunnpp]

Yeah, comments like these really make you question the authors' background in optimization. Never mind that AMD actually publishes ISA specs for all of their graphics IPs -- it is not their point that you don't understand it -- what's holding GPU programming back is often that the underlying assembly primitives are not exposed in the high level languages.

I also do wonder what 'raw assembly' is supposed to be. Is it like sushi? Perhaps it is left as future work in the paper for the authors to answer.