Why are you here? Well, ok I guess you can stay :3

  • 1 Post
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle













  • You are the one who brought up the question of even needing the CPU at all. Also, It wasn’t meant to be an attack. Just an explanation as to why you’d still need a CPU.

    why would you run x86

    All I meant was a large portion of software and compatibility tools still use it, and our modern desktop CPU architectures are still inspired from it. Things like CUDA are vastly different was my point

    But if what you meant by your original comment was to not do away with the CPU, then yes! By all means, plenty of software is now migrating to taking advantage of the GPU as much as possible. I was only addressing you asking “at some point do we even need the CPU?” - the answer is yes :)


  • GPU’s as the ONLY compute source in a computer cannot and will not function, mainly due to how pipelining works on existing architectures (and other instructions)

    You’re right, in that GPU’s are excellent at parallelization. Unfortunately when you pipeline several instructions to be run in parallel, you actually increase each individual instruction’s execution time. (Decreasing the OVERALL execution time though).

    GPU’s are stupid good at creating triangles effectively, and pinning them to a matrix that they can then do “transformations” or other altering actions to. A GPU would struggle HARD if it had to handle system calls and “time splitting” similar to how an OS handles operating system background tasks.

    This isnt even MENTIONING the instruction set changes that would be needed for x86 for example to run on a GPU alone.

    TLDR: CPU’s are here to stay for a really really long time.




  • Recently for a project of mine between me and a couple of friends, we needed to make an iOS app having never made one before. Our solution since we didn’t have reliable access to Xcode, which you need to be able to get it onto an iPhone, was to just make an Android application in Flutter. Since it’s cross-platform we used the Android simulator to test things, and then compiled it for iOS after the fact.

    All this to say you could honestly start there with flutter and not bother too much with native swift if you dont own a Mac or Macbook. If you DO own a Mac, I’d simply start with reading the swift documentation ;)