[st_goliath]

> I wonder how many out there seriously think we could ever completely rid ourselves of the CPU. It seems to be a rising sentiment.

This sentiment is not a recent thing. Ever since GPGPU became a thing, there have been people who first hear about it, don't understand processor architectures and get excited about GPUs magically making everything faster.

I vividly recall a discussion with some management type back in 2011, who was gushing about getting PHP to run on the new Nvidia Teslas, how amazingly fast websites will be!

Similar discussions also spring up around FPGAs again and again.

The more recent change in sentiment is a different one: the "graphics" origin of GPUs seem to have been lost to history. I have met people (plural) in recent years who thought (surprisingly long into the conversation) that I mean stable diffusion when talking about rendering pictures on a GPU.

Nowadays, the 'G' in GPU probably stands for GPGPU.

[ecshafer]

The dream I think has always been heterogeneous computing. The closest here I think is probably apple with their multi-core cpus with different cores, and a gpu with unified memory. (someone with more knowledge of computer architecture could probably correct me here).

Have a CPU, GPU, FPGA, and other specific chips like Neural chips. All there with unified memory and somehow pipelining specific work loads to each chip optimally to be optimal.

I wasn't really aware people thought we would be running websites on GPUs.

[fulafel]

The field explored this direction before in vector computers with high bandwidth memory (Cray etc).