Top all-time · #1888
tomforsyth1000.github.io
Personal blog · tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.htmlgamesprogramminghardware
tomforsyth1000.github.io is a personal blog at tomforsyth1000.github.io about games, programming and hardware. Since 2016, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 43 times, most often “Why didn't Larrabee fail?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tom Forsyth's blog for technical writing on Intel's Larrabee graphics project, his Babbage essays, and graphics topics such as alpha blending and scene graphs.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Babbage post 'looks great'; Larrabee post 'inspired many research papers'; blog 'interesting reading'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why didn't Larrabee fail?8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-08-15
- Babbage Was a True Genius (2006)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-02-05
- Why didn't Larrabee fail? (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-05-08
- SMCANI to AVX512 – the life cycle of an instruction set [pdf]3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-12-09
- Smacni to AVX512 the life cycle of an instruction set (2019) [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-23
- VR optics and why inter-pupillary distance (IPD) means too many things3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-16
- NaNs cause the craziest bugs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-05
- /blog.wiki.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-20
What Hacker News says?
Bit of an aside but Larrabee didn't fail. Intel inexplicably abandoned the consumer GPU market but the same tech was successfully sold to enterprise customers in the form of Xeon Phi. Several of the largest supercomputing clusters have used them. https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20...
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “Ask HN: How can ChatGPT serve 700M users when I can't run one GPT-4 locally?”Submitted Why didn't Larrabee fail? as a story · 267 points
HN discussionI remember a couple years ago reading that to get roughly of 1080p of at VR headset distances would require the equivalent , from a pixel perspective, of several (I believe it was 8) standard sized desktop monitors. The implication of this was that we were a LONG way off from having that level of resolution so I would be very interested to know current state of the art. Also, this article about how different distanc…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “I built a lay-down desk”Submitted VR optics and why inter-pupillary distance (IPD) means too many things as a story · 65 points
HN discussionWhenever i re-read Tom Forsyth's (who worked on it) article about Larrabee [1], i facepalm hard at Intel's decision to drop it. It is one of the few cases where i really wanted to put my hands on that sort of hardware. An essentially standalone manycore CPU on a PCI express form that is running FreeBSD or Linux, with a bit of graphics specific functionality that doubles as a video card and you can fully program like…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “The 3dfx Voodoo1”Submitted Babbage Was a True Genius (2006) as a story · 17 points
HN discussion> not software per [se] and more so Developer Experience This aligns with my experiences trying to use Intel software. The software was often technically very good, but the user experience trying to use it was horrible, and god help you if you got an error. Larrabee all over, really. I suppose linking to [1] and [2] is probably germane for this discussion. I swear there was another blogpost explaining the tradeoffs…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel”Submitted Why Didn't Larrabee Fail? (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've been working on VR and AR stuff for about 8 years now. I started doing it full time about 4 years ago. A lot of what I know has been from just being in the zeitgeist as things develop, so unfortunately I don't have a "reading list" to get people started. I have been trying to start a reading list, but it's woefully incomplete. I'll copy the content here (I don't have it publicly online yet). I'm primarily cente…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “Holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality”Submitted Smacni to AVX512 the life cycle of an instruction set (2019) [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLook into Larabee's architecture: https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/larrabee/larrabee.html It's another one involving Michael Abrash and it has inspired many research papers. For example, Intel developed a CPU rasterizer to handle occlusion culling and it can be faster than the GPU equivalent as it doesn't need retrieve data back from GPU to cull the draw calls: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/ar…
Comment linking /larrabee/larrabee.html
on “Quake's 3-D Engine: The Big Picture by Michael Abrash (2000)”Submitted Game Editor vs. DCC Editor as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm not an expert (my only qualification is that I read a part of Babbage's book; others must know a lot more), but see http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BBabbage... and (linked from it) https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/cards.html — it looks like he did have a reasonable design of a computer in fact. (Except for the too-many-digits-of-precision thing, that the OP tweet thread is about.) He seems to…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “It's often said that the Analytical Engine was before its time”Submitted Why didn't Larrabee fail? (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> BTW his blog post "Babbage was a true genius" looks great: http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BBabbage... Highlighting this for extra exposure. For even more info, plus an emulator, see [1] (also linked from the blog post). [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/cards.html
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “It's often said that the Analytical Engine was before its time”Submitted SMCANI to AVX512 – the life cycle of an instruction set [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhile this is a good point (yes, many of Babbage's difficulties were self-inflicted; arithmetic on 40-digit numbers wasn't needed in mechanical hardware and could be done in software as the industry started to realize in the 1970s), looking at the historical evolution—how Babbage got to the Analytical Engine—reveals the reason: • Babbage's first insight was that many books of tables (log tables, sine tables, actuari…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “It's often said that the Analytical Engine was before its time”Submitted Babbage was a true genius (2006) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat would indeed be a pretty good topic to hear about. An interesting story related to rep movsb was how the original Pentium-based Larrabee supported gather/scatter, as described in this slide deck from Tom Forsyth: http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/papers/LRBNI%20origins%20v4%... (gather/scatter info on slides 48-61, important background about virtual memory/pipeline in slides 21-28) A summary: The original Pentium…
Comment linking /papers/LRBNI%20origins%20v4%20full%20fat.pdf
on “Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086's instruction register”Submitted Dashr – Dynamically Animated Skinned Heightfield Rendering as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTom Forsyth's write up seems to make mostly reasonable claims. Though even he notes that it wasn't competitive with the high end at the time. "So let's talk about the elephant in the room - graphics. Yes, at that we did fail. And we failed mainly for reasons of time and politics. And even then we didn't fail by nearly as much as people think. Because we were never allowed to ship it, people just saw a giant crater,…
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “Ara: A 1 GHz+ Scalable and Energy-Efficient RISC-V Vector Processor”Submitted Moore's Law vs. Duck Typing (2010) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNot if you believe Tom Forsyth http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “Intel Xeon processor with FPGA now shipping”Submitted A Matter of Precision as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou'll probably find Tom Forsyth's blog on this to be interesting reading: https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20...
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “Cerebras’s giant chip will smash deep learning’s speed barrier”Submitted Why Didn't Larrabee Fail? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNote that the 512-bit Larrabee instructions (on Knight's Ferry/Corner) had different encodings (and IIRC different encodings between KNF and KNC), but it was essentially the same instruction set. The few differences there were between LRBNI and AVX-512 had (AFAIK) almost nothing to do with the move from the old Pentium in-order core to Silvermont. I think it's also safe to assume that, given the lead time to design…
Comment linking /papers/LRBNI%20origins%20v4%20full%20fat.pdf
on “Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions”Submitted Smacni to AVX512: the life cycle of an instruction set [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe Larrabee project, and all the things it spawned [1], is fascinating. [1] http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...
Comment linking /blog.wiki.html
on “A Trillion Edge Graph on a Single Commodity Node”Submitted VR optics and why IPD means too many things as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
