On the other side of the spectrum there is also a whole bunch of heavily specialised architectures on a mass market - microcontrollers, DSP (think Hexagon and alike).
OTOH, GPUs are interesting in a sense that they're not confined in any backward compatibility considerations, and therefore this is an area where most of the architectural innovation is going to happen.
Heh, here I'm going to cheat and say "Forth is sufficiently magic that its success here is the exception that proves the rule!"
I'm very impressed by it. Not my cup of tea, Lisp is, then again they have more than a little bit in common (or so I thought when someone explained Forth to me in the mid-80s).
I've been avoiding mentioning ASICs since I've been defining the category I'm talking about as excluding them. Chips for sound cards definitely fit in the ASIC category as I count it, and have plenty of company. E.g. chips for DVD and now Blu-Ray players. The first generation of OPPO player I bought included an FPGA running licensed Anchor Bay IP, the volumes they anticipated selling didn't justify an ASIC.
Game consoles are a pretty good example, although how often do they adopt truly novel stuff vs. taking off the shelf CPU and GPU IP and making their own customized and cost reducible versions?
The PS-3's Cell is an interesting case, the effort certainly had ambitions beyond game consoles.
I'd argue it and the Amiga (the first PC I thought worth buying) are examples that prove this posited rule of general purpose beating specialized, both were in the end failures.
> I'd argue it and the Amiga (the first PC I thought worth buying) are examples that prove this posited rule of general purpose beating specialized, both were in the end failures.
Doom is often cited as one of the big factors in the downfall of the Amiga, and Doom was only possible because the PC world had embraced GPUs (as well as sound cards).
The Amiga did suffer to some extent from the tight integration, and the lack of easy expandability of the low end models, but the custom chips were vital for the success it did have early on - it would never have achieved success if they'd not been able to offload the CPU to the extent they did.
In addition to this, the Amiga also suffered with the transition to 3D games because of the bet on planar graphics. But this again was one of the things that made it possible for the Amiga to be as impressive as it was in earlier years.
That wouldn't have been a problem except that Commodore failed to realise early enough that 3D was coming, and that they badly needed a chunky graphics mode to stay competitive (and we got quick hacks like Akiko as stopgap measures - a custom chip in the CD32 console that in addition to the CD controller contained functionality to speed up chunky -> planar conversions to allow games to work on chunky modes internally)
Modern PC systems have a massive amount of specialized components, going far beyond what the Amiga ever did - if anything, the architecture of the modern PC validates a lot of the design choices made for the Amiga, by offloading far more work from the CPU (and indeed, adding far more CPUs - things like hard drives now often contain CPU cores a magnitude or more faster than the CPUs on the Amigas)
Valid arguments, and after buying the first model I didn't follow the Amiga story after it was clear it was going to fail.
Doom requiring GPUs would seem to be adding to the argument that for a very long time period as these things go, their specialization paid off given the volume in which they sell.
If/when GPUs get almost entirely subsumed into CPUs (I don't have any 3D requirements, and I'm typing this on my first, 1 year old computer with integrated into the CPU graphics), I don't think it'll invalidate their "success by specialization".
However, I think I'll still go with my thesis on the Amiga: the failure to gain sufficient market share and therefore volume, plus poor to bad management, doomed it just like the Lisp Machines. And perhaps the NRE costs on the chipset, perhaps the experience of doing it and facing having to do it again, deterred the managers from going for 3D.
I submit that the steady accumulation of all that logic into fewer and fewer ASICs, and much eventually into the CPU (nowadays memory controller and PCIe lanes) and a single chip "chipset", is just natural cost reduction aligned with (massive) volume sales. How to square that with the Amiga's chipset, I'd need to think about. Perhaps later.
What are you talking about? Doom never used any GPU since there weren't any in the PCs. It was banging bytes to the frame buffer. Doom could be faster on PC because one byte was one pixel. On Amiga, one had to use bitplanes which killed performance unless one could use the Blitter.
