By: ⚛ (0xe2.0x9a.0x9b.delete@this.gmail.com), June 30, 2013 11:42 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
I suppose the text below is just an unfortunate excess that won't repeat in the future.
Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on June 29, 2013 12:22 pm wrote:
> Why anybody would ever care about FP performance is beyond me.
>
> Just look at history. FP has never ever mattered commercially. Ever. Intel laughed all
> the way to the bank in the old i387 days when the RISC camp was beating it silly. Intel beat
> them where it mattered: on random integer code. Nobody ever complained about the FP performance,
> although the RISC people were beating their chests purple about their lead.
>
> Fast-forward ten years, and the FP laughingstock was ARM, with its crazy variations on FPU's,
> and most chips sold not having one at all. Again, nobody actually cared, except the different
> variations just annoying people endlessly (and often caused people to use software FP - or
> at least library calls - even when there was hardware), and ARM sold like hotcakes.
>
> The only market use for FP is for graphics, and only a tiny amount of that
> gets done on the CPU, mainly setting things up for the GPU. Yeah, yeah, games
> do FP on the CPU too, but it's dwarfed by the non-FP parts they do.
>
> I realize this forum has people who do fluid dynamics and stuff like that,
> but sorry guys, you're not a market for anybody, you're an afterthought.
>
> Even now, FP seems to matter only for benchmarks, not for any actual real load that sells
> machines. And even there, if the benchmark is actually worth anything at all, it's not
> about the actual FP capabilities most of the time, but about the memory subsystem.
>
> AVX? Who could possibly care in the kind of space Atom is designed for? Really?
>
> Linus
Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on June 29, 2013 12:22 pm wrote:
> Why anybody would ever care about FP performance is beyond me.
>
> Just look at history. FP has never ever mattered commercially. Ever. Intel laughed all
> the way to the bank in the old i387 days when the RISC camp was beating it silly. Intel beat
> them where it mattered: on random integer code. Nobody ever complained about the FP performance,
> although the RISC people were beating their chests purple about their lead.
>
> Fast-forward ten years, and the FP laughingstock was ARM, with its crazy variations on FPU's,
> and most chips sold not having one at all. Again, nobody actually cared, except the different
> variations just annoying people endlessly (and often caused people to use software FP - or
> at least library calls - even when there was hardware), and ARM sold like hotcakes.
>
> The only market use for FP is for graphics, and only a tiny amount of that
> gets done on the CPU, mainly setting things up for the GPU. Yeah, yeah, games
> do FP on the CPU too, but it's dwarfed by the non-FP parts they do.
>
> I realize this forum has people who do fluid dynamics and stuff like that,
> but sorry guys, you're not a market for anybody, you're an afterthought.
>
> Even now, FP seems to matter only for benchmarks, not for any actual real load that sells
> machines. And even there, if the benchmark is actually worth anything at all, it's not
> about the actual FP capabilities most of the time, but about the memory subsystem.
>
> AVX? Who could possibly care in the kind of space Atom is designed for? Really?
>
> Linus