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Top-level
 @TomF I will be happy to update and correct the talk. There *might* be a bit of an element of Cunningham's Law there. To respond though, I don't think I need a coherent memory fabric, for the stuff I'm doing I'm fairly happy using atomics to indicate explicit communication between workgroups. Interesting correction re texture queries. From my perspective I don't see a huge difference between "CISC instruction" and "send a packet" but from yours I can see it's pretty different. 2 comments
 @raph BY the way, enjoying the whole discussion of your renderer because it sounds like all the same problems we had with the Larrabee renderer. We had a tile-based renderer, also for load-balancing reasons, and we also had problems with potentially massive intermediate buffers. Even though the cores were general x86 cores that could indeed call malloc() in the middle of things (though note there's no backing store if you run out!), the overhead of that is huge, so you try to avoid it. |
Gregory's Server
@raph Yup - unless you literally need the machine to run an off-the-shelf OS with very few changes, you clearly want to be able to bypass the coherent fabric for all sorts of traffic. It burns a lot of power and limits your bandwidth.
We had lots of plans for turning it off for certain areas of memory, and make the traffic look more like a GPU, but we never got the chance to implement those. Ah well.