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0 pointskllrnohj1y ago0 comments

That's orthogonal. Fixed-function hardware has a power efficiency advantage over programmable hardware. This isn't new or surprising, but it's also unrelated to CPU vs. GPU. Both CPU & GPU are programmable, so that's not relevant.

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astrange1y ago· 1 in thread

Those aren't useful distinctions. You might as well say the ALUs in a CPU aren't programmable because they aren't the instruction decoders.

kllrnohjOP1y ago

Huh? Weren't you referring to things like the video decoding blocks? Those are genuinely fixed-function things, they have no aspects of programmability to them. It's why their capabilities are fixed for all time (eg, AV1 support requires a hardware change). It's like a pre-shader GPU.

It's a very useful distinction to make.

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