Yeah, it used to be true that server GPUs at least somewhat resembled their gaming counterparts (i.e. Nvidia Tesla server components from 12+ years ago); they were still PCIe cards, just with server-optimized coolers, and fundamentally shared the same dies that the gaming and professional cards used.
That stopped being true many years ago though, and the divergence has only accelerated with the advent of AI datacenter usage. The form factor is now fundamentally different (SXM instead of PCIe); you can adapt an SXM card to PCIe with some effort [1], but that may not even be worthwhile because 1. the power and cooling requirements for the SXM cards are radically different than a desktop part and more importantly 2. the dies are no longer even close to being the same. IIRC, Blackwell AI chips straight up don't have rasterization hardware onboard at all; internally they look like a moderate number of general SMs attached to a huge number of tensor core. Modern AI GPUs are fundamentally optimized for, well, mat-mults, which is not at all what you want for gaming or really any non-AI application.
One I like is Tom Macwright’s blog [1], which somewhat famously loads insanely fast thanks to having a sort of the web equivalent of a brutalist design while still looking nice [2].
I think this project is best described by one of my favorite quotes from Top Gear: “an ingenious solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place”.
When I first started at Disney Animation, at one point I asked Ed Catmull what the rationale was for staffing two separate rendering teams, and he had an interesting answer. His answer was that it turns out that even when Disney Animation was using RenderMan, the high end needs of the studio still required enough rendering developers/TDs that in terms of cost it was essentially no different than staffing a team to build an in-house renderer, and from that perspective he liked the idea of having two separate teams with different focuses/perspectives so that for hard problems the wider company got two attempts at coming up with good solutions instead of one.
To this day the Hyperion and RenderMan teams work pretty closely together and share a lot of learnings/tech/R&D. The focuses are pretty different between the two renderers, and that’s actually been pretty beneficial to both.
The story with Presto is both a bit different and kind of similar. The two studios are now unified in using Presto, but Disney Animation now has an in-house Presto development team that co-develops Presto with Pixar. The two dev teams focus on the needs of their respective studios but move Presto forward together.
Indeed. And it has happened before that well-known brands change owners and suddenly push new products with certain risks attached for the user. That's all I wanted to point out, and for QNX it would be a very easy way to build trust by having this kind of information (or imprint) on their website.
One of the open secrets of AWS is that even though AWS has a lot of regions and availability zones, a lot of AWS services have control planes that are dependent on / hosted out of us-east-1 regardless of which region / AZ you're using, meaning even if you are using a different availability zone in a different region, us-east-1 going down still can mess you up.
I am pretty squeamish around blood (even reading about it...), but this piece was so well written and engrossing and impactful that I made it all the way through in one shot. I had no idea that the bovie instrument (and broadly the entire field of electrosurgery [1]) was even a thing; I assumed it was anll still scalpels and such.
An incredible piece highlighting something people should know more about; thanks for posting this!
I too am squeamish and while I agree that the piece was very well written, it was too much for me. I had to tap out during the part about 18th/19th century grafting experiments. Just too much for me lol.
Will probably pick this back up and skip over the rest of that part though!
You can in fact already do this (have Mac windows show up as separate floating windows in VisionOS instead of all being on the single MacOS window) using a third party tool called Ensemble:
The point is that this should absolutely be capable of being a power-computing extension for Mac, but instead it’s been relegated to a $3k personal theater that runs apps for some reason
That stopped being true many years ago though, and the divergence has only accelerated with the advent of AI datacenter usage. The form factor is now fundamentally different (SXM instead of PCIe); you can adapt an SXM card to PCIe with some effort [1], but that may not even be worthwhile because 1. the power and cooling requirements for the SXM cards are radically different than a desktop part and more importantly 2. the dies are no longer even close to being the same. IIRC, Blackwell AI chips straight up don't have rasterization hardware onboard at all; internally they look like a moderate number of general SMs attached to a huge number of tensor core. Modern AI GPUs are fundamentally optimized for, well, mat-mults, which is not at all what you want for gaming or really any non-AI application.
[1] https://l4rz.net/running-nvidia-sxm-gpus-in-consumer-pcs/
reply