> Hardware architectures to support video games and media, on the other hand
I'll have to disagree about the video games bit. Today's consoles are a completely regular AMD x64 CPU together with a completely regular AMD GPU, one running a version of Windows, plus one that uses PowerPC.
Yesterday's were two with multi-core PowerPC and an AMD GPU, one running a version of Windows, plus one with that really weird PowerPC together with 7 tiny PowerPClets and an nVidia GPU that was famously awful to program for.
Going back even further, we have an Intel x86 together with an nVidia GPU, running a version of Windows, a PowerPC-based CPU and an ATI-developed GPU (minor note: the company, ArtX, that was doing the GPU got bought by ATI and their designs did end up in ATI GPUs, so I'm listing it as such), a Hitachi SuperH CPU together with a PowerVR GPU, running a version of Windows, and this weird design from SONY.
And going back a further iteration things get even weirder and so on and so forth.
I'll agree that the further we go, the more these systems are made from specialised components (hello Saturn) and don't resemble what you'd get from e.g. a Dell. But that is mostly because you needed to use specialised components to get really cutting-edge performance for those tasks. Today you can more or less stick in 4 x64 cores and forget about it.
Today you can more or less stick in 4 x64 cores and forget about it.
That only works for embarrassingly parallel tasks. Start requiring coordination, and today's hardware makes efficient parallelism plus concurrency hard.
I'll have to disagree about the video games bit. Today's consoles are a completely regular AMD x64 CPU together with a completely regular AMD GPU, one running a version of Windows, plus one that uses PowerPC.
Yesterday's were two with multi-core PowerPC and an AMD GPU, one running a version of Windows, plus one with that really weird PowerPC together with 7 tiny PowerPClets and an nVidia GPU that was famously awful to program for.
Going back even further, we have an Intel x86 together with an nVidia GPU, running a version of Windows, a PowerPC-based CPU and an ATI-developed GPU (minor note: the company, ArtX, that was doing the GPU got bought by ATI and their designs did end up in ATI GPUs, so I'm listing it as such), a Hitachi SuperH CPU together with a PowerVR GPU, running a version of Windows, and this weird design from SONY.
And going back a further iteration things get even weirder and so on and so forth.
I'll agree that the further we go, the more these systems are made from specialised components (hello Saturn) and don't resemble what you'd get from e.g. a Dell. But that is mostly because you needed to use specialised components to get really cutting-edge performance for those tasks. Today you can more or less stick in 4 x64 cores and forget about it.