GPUs and accelerators (was Re: [f-cpu] Status quo)

[whygee@xxxxxxxxx]

Le 2015-03-30 22:30, Cedric BAIL a ÃcritÂ:
> Hello,
<snip>

Hi Cedric,
you wrote many very interesting things in this post
and I hope we'll continue in another thread soon.
Having you as a graphics specialist is invaluable :-)

>   For the "crypto" stuff, I guess that AES and CRC are the basis
> things you need. I would argue that helper for ECC is also very useful
> this day ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5656 ). Them being
> accessible from outside of the kernel space is an absolute must
> (That's why instruction are usually better suited for that task).

I would add fast hash (for hashtables such as in dynamic languages)
and secure hash primitives.

>   Actually one of the thing that I would have loved to see many times
> is a way to tell the MMU to map a memory area as a tile.
I had been thinking about something like this for more than a decade,
so an application could map its memory to a windowed screen...
the application would "see" a bitmap, but it would not be able
to access any pixel outside of the allowed rectangle.

>   Well, in fact anything that make it possible to increase the
> available memory bandwidth is going to help here.
I agree but memory bandwidth mostly depends on the money
you can throw at it... it's mostly a HW, implementation-dependent issue.
The VHDL source code can be tuned but it can't go faster than
the pins and traces allow.

>   Also I am not sure we want to tackle the subject of GPU here, but
> still I think it is worth looking at Vulkan
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_%28API%29) and SPIR-V in 
> particular
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Portable_Intermediate_Representation).
> The later one is likely going to become a potential backend for OpenGL
> and OpenCL, so maybe it makes sense to study it and take that into
> account while designing any interaction with external block.
I have no idea what it looks like under the hood but it sounds very 
interesting.
I count on you to keep your eyes on it :-)
Could the SPIR-V be used for different, non-GPU purposes ? ;-)

yg
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