Comment by ghaff
9 hours ago
I looked at this for a client close to 20 years ago. The problem is that you need to get software support for it. Arguably easier these days with open source but still doesn't magically happen.
9 hours ago
I looked at this for a client close to 20 years ago. The problem is that you need to get software support for it. Arguably easier these days with open source but still doesn't magically happen.
The nice thing is that for GPUs you're rarely writing directly against the metal but instead pseudocode lowered by the driver; the driver could know to just lower it this way. On an NVidia GPU they control the whole stack and don't need to get a further ecosystem going there. Possibly the same for Apple.
Apple is such a vertical stack, I'm not sure how to generalize from that. Certainly the same was true on IBM mainframes. And, when I wrote open source, I could probably have written abstraction more broadly.
I am thinking the first place this appears is on GPUs and maybe Apple with unified memory, it is not going to be on PCs.