another Dave Orton interview

[nelg]

This was first of all testament to the Alpha design team, generally regarded as the best in the business and their designs the most elegant.

And they looked really cool (at the time).

P.S. Welcome back.

 

[OpenGL guy]

And now, apparently, a number of engineers from the Alpha compiler team have turned up at ATI working on shader compilers. I don't know the details, but I would guess this happened about the time of the Compaq-HP merger or soon afterwards. In any case, given their track record and the so-far rather unimpressive state of shader compilers, it's reasonable to expect impressive performance gains from them.

I certainly hope that Dio and others who work on our compilers aren't insulted by such remarks! Maybe you could take a little more care in your off-the-cuff commentary about things you are in no real position to judge? I mean, since you are referring to DEC employees that are now at ATI, you must be referring to ATI above, right?

It's funny that you say that shader compilers are unimpressive, when hardly any application uses a shader that can be optimized at all (there's not much you can do with PS 1.1 shaders unless they are severely broken to begin with). In case you hadn't noticed, there have been some improvements in the R3x0 results in the ShaderMark tests over the last year or so. Mightn't those come from compiler improvements?

 

[Reverend]

OpenGL guy, DaveH (like many, many others) was just giving his opinion. I can understand your acting defensive for your company but perhaps being slightly more aloof and taking such opinion-based comments less seriously would be less stressful for you. Like andypski, Dio or sireric.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

I gotta agree with Rev on this. I took Dave H's comments as relating to shader compiler infancy in general...

Your point about shader compilers not really having to do all that much at this time is well taken though.

 

[OpenGL guy]

OpenGL guy, DaveH (like many, many others) was just giving his opinion. I can understand your acting defensive for your company but perhaps being slightly more aloof and taking such opinion-based comments less seriously would be less stressful for you. Like andypski, Dio or sireric.

I wasn't offended, I just wondered if others could be. Some people have really invested a lot of time into this stuff, and it's sad to see someone trivialize it. Oh well.

 

[Dave Baumann]

I can understand where OGL Guy is coming from here because we know that Dio, who is a regular here, is one of the guys that have been contributing to R300's current compiler efforts and now we're talking about something separate (although we don't understand how much reuse of his code there is in the "DEC" compiler). I had already broached the subject with Dio before mentioning it in the review, though.

 

[Simon F]

(although we don't understand how much reuse of his code there is in the "DEC" compiler).

[OT]
Ooooh. I used to use a Fortran 4 compiler on a DEC 10 with magnetic core memory.
[/OT]

 

[Quitch]

Quick, the nerds are trying to break through! Seal the dimensional breach!