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Google Deprecating RenderScript In Favor Of Vulkan Compute

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  • #11
    Originally posted by ehansin View Post

    Curious thought, and I really don't have the answer, but in yesterday's posting here on the M1 GPU ("More Progress Is Made Understanding Apple's M1 GPU, Working Towards An Open Driver") their was speculation that the M1 GPU was simpler in design that fit catering to the Metal API, which the commenter claimed to be even more low-level that DX12 or Vulcan. Further speculating that more complex hardware elements may be required to fit into a DX12 and/or Vulcan world, in fact that complexity in hardware may have been necessitated to cater to these.

    Again, I don't know the answer to this, but wonder in the future if that "simpler" ends up being better. Obviously an open standard (i.e. Vulcan) is what you really want, and everything I read here makes it sound like a great thing. I am not an expert in these things, only something that came to mind. Regardless, I'll take the "Festivus for the Rest Of Us", thank you very much!
    RISC and CISC...
    Hi

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    • #12
      Originally posted by ehansin View Post

      Curious thought, and I really don't have the answer, but in yesterday's posting here on the M1 GPU ("More Progress Is Made Understanding Apple's M1 GPU, Working Towards An Open Driver") their was speculation that the M1 GPU was simpler in design that fit catering to the Metal API, which the commenter claimed to be even more low-level that DX12 or Vulcan. Further speculating that more complex hardware elements may be required to fit into a DX12 and/or Vulcan world, in fact that complexity in hardware may have been necessitated to cater to these.

      Again, I don't know the answer to this, but wonder in the future if that "simpler" ends up being better. Obviously an open standard (i.e. Vulcan) is what you really want, and everything I read here makes it sound like a great thing. I am not an expert in these things, only something that came to mind. Regardless, I'll take the "Festivus for the Rest Of Us", thank you very much!
      I think you're on to something. If I may, in my probably flawed grokking of the news that Apple's Metal is lower level and closer to the "Metal", (Pun most intentional) , than either Vulkan or the AMD Mantle inspired DirectX 12, in part because the M1's GPU is actually a "simpler" design causes me to hearken back to 2005 when at the company I worked for at the time had purchased a couple of Silicon Graphics Octanes in the late 90s in order to possibly develop real time AR graphics for sports stats and adverts for virtual placement in camera on the field. Nothing came of it at that time and by the time I found one dusting away in a closet SGI had gotten out of the desktop graphics market. So, I helped myself to it and it's big ass 21" SGI branded Sony Trinitron CRT monitor and set out to learn Unix via SGI's version called IRIX.

      Long story short, I discovered a graphics demo app by SGI that showed off some of the real time warping and layering effects on images that the Octane could do. HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL JAM !! That beast of a workstation could do things with a 300 Mhz MIPS CPU and VPU board ( what they called a GPU ) with 256 MB of RAM made in 1997 that my 1 Ghz AMD Dual Athlon with 1GB of RAM and an actual ATI GPU card couldn't do in 2005...(it was Windows based, it would be another year before I went Linux)

      The MIPS CPU was a very "simple" RISC CPU design particularly compared to any x86 or even PowerPC of that day much less afterwards. But the entire SGI board and interconnect design was VERY WIDE. Data just didn't get backed up like it did in a typical x86 bus design. In fact AMDs eventual HyperTransport bus design was inspired in part by the crossbar design of the MIPS bus. Plus SGI was the inventor of OpenGL the graphics API we have come to know so well. Back then and especially compared to the early version of DirectX, OpenGL WAS the close to metal graphics solution. PARTICULARLY for MIPS. So the chip designs didn't really need to be as complex. You just load up the RAM, widen the data channels, utilize a wide crossbar bus, and utilize RISC techniques and close to metal APIs and the next thing you know is you're creating Jurassic Park, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings just to name a few.

      It seems Apple has indeed taken more than a few pages from the early SGI playbook. I think I could make more than a hand waving argument in stating that Apple with it's M1 CPU and it's homegrown GPU and it's homegrown Metal API is the "spiritual" successor to SGI.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by ehansin View Post
        to the Metal API, which the commenter claimed to be even more low-level that DX12 or Vulcan.
        Not more low-level. Its a simple very feature-less API designed for a simple very feature-less GPU.
        Vulkan is low level as in its API matches the hardware feature set of a proper modern GPU, and that is simply more then Apple's Toy Tile Render GPU.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by Jumbotron View Post

          In fact AMDs eventual HyperTransport bus design was inspired in part by the crossbar design of the MIPS bus. Plus SGI was the inventor of OpenGL the graphics API we have come to know so well.
          Actually HT was inspired by Alpha. Jim Keller brought this "philosophy" from the DEC when he joined AMD afterwards.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by stiiixy View Post
            They (Google) theoretically could patch new features in to older Android versions, but that's never been their thing. Disposable (or, 'moving forward' in their opinion) is their approach.
            among other nice features I can recommend /e/ OS https://e.foundation/ ....you will get newer "android" builds for older devices.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by Jumbotron View Post
              Vulkan's main modus operandi was to eventually supplant OpenGL. But with Google's announcement today that reality is fully grounded.
              Except they deprecated RenderScript, not OpenGL.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by microcode View Post
                Would've been nice if their transitional library was a RenderScript implementation on Vulkán compute...
                You misunderstand them. They are trying to push people off of RenderScript, and that would let them cling to it.

                This is how Google operates. When they deprecate something, you'd better move before it gets yanked out from under you!

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by Jumbotron View Post
                  That beast of a workstation could do things with a 300 Mhz MIPS CPU and VPU board ( what they called a GPU ) with 256 MB of RAM made in 1997 that my 1 Ghz AMD Dual Athlon with 1GB of RAM and an actual ATI GPU card couldn't do in 2005...
                  Their O2's (the ones that looked like old-timey toasters) had video features that made them very popular for realtime broadcast graphics. I think a lot of it had to do with the shared-memory architecture that's now the mainstream architecture for phones, tablets, and all but high-end desktops and laptops. Texture-mapping with realtime video was their main party trick.

                  Funny enough, the O2's were the entry-level machines. For the Octanes to do similar, I think you needed a specialized video board, like you mentioned.

                  Neither of these machines could do the vast majority of 3D rendering as well as 2005-era PCs.

                  Originally posted by Jumbotron View Post
                  It seems Apple has indeed taken more than a few pages from the early SGI playbook. I think I could make more than a hand waving argument in stating that Apple with it's M1 CPU and it's homegrown GPU and it's homegrown Metal API is the "spiritual" successor to SGI.
                  You're reading way too much into it. Those old SGI machines didn't even have programmable pixel shaders! Old-school OpenGL (i.e. pre-3.0) was very much built around a fixed-function pipeline.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by bug77 View Post

                    I'm "bitching" about people praising today something most people won't see for at least another 3 years.
                    The move itself is sound, but Google still haven't solved the problem of pushing their OS onto existing devices. In fact, they stopped trying and decided it's easier to just hide adoption numbers from the web instead.
                    Android is on mobile, unlike chromeOs. So I consider the vulkan integration able to take benefit from the GPU despite of Renderscript a progress for users (I'm not questioning about google company and its Os as well, because I'm used to apply linux Oses which I prefer).
                    Last edited by Azrael5; 20 April 2021, 01:33 PM.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
                      One of the few times where Google abandons a project and it isn't a major problem.
                      I don't think I have ever used (or even heard of) RenderScript...

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