anonymous2 (anonymous2.delete@this.example.com) on July 13, 2020 10:32 am wrote:
> > I did exactly what Maynard suggested - read performance counters while opening some web pages.
> > You get maybe 10 MFLOPs per several billion instructions. So not that many FLOPS.
>
> Neat.
>
> Are you able to tell how wide (or which SIMD) these are?
>
> Certainly ~0% is exaggeration, but is the amount enough to justify
> a lot of silicon and complexity for what most people do?
>
> Yes Blender exists. Lots of things exist that use FP. A lot.
>
> Most people don't use them at all and those that do not very much as an overall amount of processing time.
>
> Lost of people have Chromebooks which have little in the way of high performance FP.
>
> Arguing everyone should have high performance silicon is like arguing everyone should have a heavy-duty truck.

Two points.
- I suspect on a Mac (perhaps even more so on iOS) the number would be higher. Not insanely higher, but maybe 10x higher?
Apple has embraced FP across the "GUI" level of the OS in a way that Windows and Linux have not. (And I think it has paid off in terms of flexibility, of the ability to do things like rescale the UI to different pixel densities, or to move to HDR, or to provide ever more elaborate forms of color layering without too much difficulty.
Obviously the GPU does the heavy lifting for many of these, but the fact that the seed values are fp provides the flexibility; eg if your starting point for color values is 0.0 to 1.0, it's easier to ramp the color values up to 11 (ie HDR) than if your color model is built around #00 to #FF.)
This same mindset may have paid off in a lot more use of FP in all the text layout stuff, and then up into webcore with CSS and HTML layout calculations.

- The difference is that a heavy-duty truck costs serious money, FP does not.
A better analogy is arguing that everyone should have a screwdriver in the house. Sure, you don't use it as much as a knife or a spoon, maybe twice a year. But it's cheap, it's easy to keep around, and it's really nice to have available on those occasions when you need it.
That's the whole point of dark silicon -- use the cheap transistors for stuff that is nice when you need it, even if you only need it rarely.