Comment by zurn
10 years ago
Nitpicking: in the offline rendering world RenderMan had shaders ca. 1990[1], and graphics hackers got around to compiling those for research GPUs in the 90s too[2]. (Hardware had programmability equivalent to current shaders early as well [3], but no compilers for fancy shading languages)
[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/bib/pdf/p289-hanrahan.... [2] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~olano/papers/pxflshading.pdf [3] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~pxfl/papers/high-speed_rendering.pdf
That's some neat stuff. Especially PixelFlow. It had some clever, architectural decisions in terms of memory and computing primitives. Such schemes are already re-appearing in deep learning chips with old work like this maybe having some ideas waiting to be re-discovered.