so is there actually a good reason to separate, physically or logically, the CPU from the GPU? couldn't you have an ISA that mixes both general-purpose and "graphics" operations? obviously you'd have to have vastly more cores than a standard CPU but you'd think you'd benefit from not having to shuffle data back and forth across a bus, and be able to just work directly on the same memory

i know very little about this topic so maybe this is completely retarded, idk. it just seems weird that even integrated CPU-GPUs logically separate the two components so you have to transmit data back and forth with e.g. glBufferData

@velartrill gpus are heavily parallelized simd architectures. they are more like batch jobs of old times. you load a bunch of data, press start and then retrieve the results.

@bonifartius yea i have some idea of the basic principles, i just don't see why that couldn't be integrated into the CPU itself and share an address space. like, most(?) CPUs already have some level of SIMD capability

@velartrill @bonifartius My understanding is that there's a large overhead in loading data back and forth between the main RAM and the GPU RAM. So would the shared memory of an integrated GPU eliminate that?

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@jleedev sure, but i don't know how feasible it would be to put several GB of RAM onto the CPU die.

@velartrill

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