Just curious about your thought process.
No you aren't.
Yes I am. Do you think I have these lengthy discussions just to kill time? No, I enjoy computer graphics technology and to understand where it's heading I am genuinely interested in why people come to certain conclusions.
AFAICS you are not concerned with anyone else's thoughts but your own. You routinely talk past valid points others bring up (limitations of silicon, power consumption, die area, cost), and offer no tangible evidence of your own either to support your own claims or dismiss those of others.
If I was only concerned about my own thoughts I would keep them to myself and not put them out in the open for everyone to criticize. Heck I invite people to criticize them, because I am interested in
their thoughts. I invite
you to criticize them. But be prepared to engage in a discussion where I will formulate counter-arguments. That's not the same thing as talking past valid points. I take those points very seriously and for unification to happen they would have to be overcome.
Regarding offering "tangible evidence" let's get it straight that this isn't a trial for a past event. We're all speculating about the future, and there is no tangible evidence that the CPU and GPU will not unify either. All we have is evidence of past evolution and the assumption that it will continue or indications that it won't. The evidence of past convergence between the CPU and GPU is in strong favor of unification and has thus far overcome the many arguments that are used against it continuing. There is also tangible evidence of things that have converged and then unified in the past. So like it or not it's a harder case to defend the claim that unification won't happen.
If there are indications that this convergence will turn around, which you think I'm underestimating, then I'm most interested in hearing about your reasoning.
Yes.
In fact, I also see the advantages of a unified ISA (or at least one being a superset of the other). But whether those will ultimately be worth it or even necessary is unclear to me. I would also like to point out that even if you have a unified ISA that does not mean you have to have a pool of identical cores.
Wow, major flashback! It's uncanny how
almost your exact words were used to discuss vertex/pixel processing unification on the GPU. A lot of people considered it an advantage to have mostly the same instructions available for both, but it was still unclear to them what the exact value would be, and they didn't consider physical unification to be a necessary consequence of it. Guess what, the GPU did get a fully unified ISA, the advantages for creating more advanced graphics (and beyond) are huge, and as far as I know they all have unified cores.
So how is your desire for a unified address space and a homogeneous ISA fundamentally different and not in favor of CPU-GPU unification? What exactly have I been underestimating to such an extent that it "screams bullshit" to you?
I am simply asking you to take a stance and provide some argumentation of your own. But if you're really ambivalent about the ROPs unifying into the shader cores, why are you unambivalent about CPU-GPU unification? Again, a penny for your thoughts.
Right, you know how much thought I have put into it.
With all due respect unless this is the best you can do you don't seem to have put much thought into it at all. You just rehash what others have said without making it your 'own' arguments by defending them with insightfulness instead of going off on a personal tangent. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt once more. Enlighten me with your wisdom. You might want to start with the ROPs.