alt Hacker NewsIt's funny how ideas come and go. I made this very comment here on Hacker News probably 4-5 years ago and received a few down votes for it at the time (albeit that I was thinking of computers in general).
It would take a lot of work to make a GPU do current CPU type tasks, but it would be interesting to see how it changes parallelism and our approach to logic in code.
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Is there any need for that? Just have a few good CPUs there and you’re good to go.
As for how the HW looks like we already know. Look at Strix Halo as an example. We are just getting bigger and bigger integrated GPUs. Most of the flops on that chip is the GPU part.
It would just make everything worse. Some (if anything, most) tasks are far less paralleliseable than typical GPU loads.
HN in general is quite clueless about topics like hardware, high performance computing, graphics, and AI performance. So you probably shouldn't care if you are downvoted, especially if you honestly know you are being correct.
Also, I'd say if you buy for example a Macbook with an M4 Pro chip, it is already is a big GPU attached to a small CPU.
> I made this very comment here on Hacker News probably 4-5 years ago and received a few down votes for it at the time
HN isn't always very rational about voting. It will be a loss if you judge any idea on their basis.
> It would take a lot of work to make a GPU do current CPU type tasks
In my opinion, that would be counterproductive. The advantage of GPUs is that they have a large number of very simple GPU cores. Instead, just do a few separate CPU cores on the same die, or on a separate die. Or you could even have a forest of GPU cores with a few CPU cores interspersed among them - sort of like how modern FPGAs have logic tiles, memory tiles and CPU tiles spread out on it. I doubt it would be called a GPU at that point.