TI had similar idea with TI-99/4 - running interpreted BASIC programs using BASIC written in special interpreted language (GPL) running in its own virtual machine, with actual CPU machine code executing from ram accessible thru single byte window of Video processor. Really brilliant system, turtles all the way down.

I can totally see some middle managers swallowing "You get used to it, I don't even see the code, All I see is blond, brunette, redhead" sales pitch.

The answer is its not a data center. Trump watched Alex Garland's Civil War (2024), maybe even requested intelligence briefing on putin's Palace bunker.

You mean other than this being AI slop company, usage is monitoring AI slop output and author confirming blog is AI slop? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372060

Because GPU developers started to be less lazy :)

No T&L meant everything was culled, clipped, transformed and per-vertex divided (perspective, lighting) on CPU.

Then you have brute force approach. Voodoo 1/2/3 doesnt employ any obvious speedup tricks in its pipeline. Every single triangle pushed into it is going to get textured (bilinear filtering, per pixel divide), shaded (lighting, blending, FOG applied) and then in the last step the card finally checks Z-buffer to decide between writing all this computed data to buffer or simply throwing it away.

It took a while before GPU devs started implementing low-hanging fruit optimizations https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/to-earlyz-or-not-to-early...

Hierarchical-Z, Fast Z clearing, Compressed Z buffer, Compressed Textures, Tiled shading. It all got added slowly one step at a time in early 2000.

Funny how people know Fabrice for all the software stuff but none of the hardware antics:

played with implementing analog modem DSP in software in 1999 (linmodem is ~50-80% there, sadly never finished)

probably leading to

played with implementing SDR (again DSP) using VGA output to transmit DVB-T/NTSC/PAL in 2005

probably leading to

Amarisoft SDR 5G base station, commercial product started in 2012 - his current job https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us

I was going to mention the last one, and his ASN.1 compiler which is likely related to his telco work:

https://bellard.org/ffasn1/

As a maintainer of an ASN.1 compiler, I think his ASN.1 compiler must be quite awesome (it's not open source), and it's brilliant of him to make it proprietary. I bet he makes good money from it.

Similar AI slop of 1960s Warsaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7H9HraDeEw

Might be dihydrogen monoxide, you never know.

The less they sell, the bigger valuation!

Semi by hand got out of hand (HA!) in the nineties. There is simply too much work for humans (millions of transistors) so we swallow performance hit. Synthesis puts stuff together from human optimized basic building blocks. Same reason FPGA tools quickly advanced from schematic input to hardware description languages.

With PCB its all still quite manageable, even something like whole PC motherboard is easily doable by two-three EEs specializing in different niches (power, thermals, high speed digital design).