Frustrating part A is that we have a universal binary format… and it’s HTML5. Frustrating part B is that nobody with a purchasing department wants to admit it. Slack ships with its own browser like you don’t have one. Modern web games can run on a sufficiently fancy Amiga, yet there have been Electron apps without a Linux version. That Amiga’s gonna suffer overhead and unstable performance, but I mean, so do native Unreal 5 games.
The good ending from here would be a period of buck-wild development. RISC-V, MIPS, finally doing that guy’s Mill CPU. I was gonna say that neural networks might finally get high parallelism taken seriously, but no, optimized matrix algebra will stay relegated to specialty hardware. Somewhere between a GPU and an FPU. There’s server chips with a hundred cores and it still hasn’t revived Tilera. They’re just running more stuff, at normal speed.
The few things that need to happen quickly instead of a lot will probably push FPGAs toward the mainstream. The finance-bro firehose of money barely splashed it, when high-frequency trading was the hot new thing. Oh yeah: I guess some exchanges put in several entire seconds of fiber optics, to keep the market comprehensible. Anyway, big FPGAs at sane prices would be great for experimentation, as the hardware market splinters into anything with an LLVM back-end. Also nice for anything you need to happen a zillion times a second on one AA battery, but neural networks will probably cover that as well, anywhere accuracy is negotiable.
Sheer quantity of memory will be a deciding factor for a while. Phones and laptops put us in a weird place where 6 GB was considered plenty, for over a decade. DRAM sucks battery and SRAM is priced like it’s hand-etched by artisanal craftsmen. Now this AI summer has produced guides like ‘If you only have 96 GB of VRAM, set it to FP8. Peasant.’ Then again - with SSDs, maybe anything that’s not state is just cache. Occasionally your program hitches for an entire millisecond. Even a spinning disk makes a terabyte of swap dirrrt cheap. That and patience will run any damn thing.
Frustrating part A is that we have a universal binary format… and it’s HTML5. Frustrating part B is that nobody with a purchasing department wants to admit it. Slack ships with its own browser like you don’t have one. Modern web games can run on a sufficiently fancy Amiga, yet there have been Electron apps without a Linux version. That Amiga’s gonna suffer overhead and unstable performance, but I mean, so do native Unreal 5 games.
The good ending from here would be a period of buck-wild development. RISC-V, MIPS, finally doing that guy’s Mill CPU. I was gonna say that neural networks might finally get high parallelism taken seriously, but no, optimized matrix algebra will stay relegated to specialty hardware. Somewhere between a GPU and an FPU. There’s server chips with a hundred cores and it still hasn’t revived Tilera. They’re just running more stuff, at normal speed.
The few things that need to happen quickly instead of a lot will probably push FPGAs toward the mainstream. The finance-bro firehose of money barely splashed it, when high-frequency trading was the hot new thing. Oh yeah: I guess some exchanges put in several entire seconds of fiber optics, to keep the market comprehensible. Anyway, big FPGAs at sane prices would be great for experimentation, as the hardware market splinters into anything with an LLVM back-end. Also nice for anything you need to happen a zillion times a second on one AA battery, but neural networks will probably cover that as well, anywhere accuracy is negotiable.
Sheer quantity of memory will be a deciding factor for a while. Phones and laptops put us in a weird place where 6 GB was considered plenty, for over a decade. DRAM sucks battery and SRAM is priced like it’s hand-etched by artisanal craftsmen. Now this AI summer has produced guides like ‘If you only have 96 GB of VRAM, set it to FP8. Peasant.’ Then again - with SSDs, maybe anything that’s not state is just cache. Occasionally your program hitches for an entire millisecond. Even a spinning disk makes a terabyte of swap dirrrt cheap. That and patience will run any damn thing.