This obviously makes sense that direct hardware implementations will out perform their software "mimicked" counterparts. These fixed function hardwares are becoming very popular in mobile devices, especially in terms of photography! I wonder if we will also see them begin to spread to laptops and desktop computers as well. Potentially VR will see the use of fixed function hardware as well due to faster execution times needed because of the display latency.
EggyLv999
Fixed function hardware has been around in computers forever, actually. If you know you're going to do always do an operation that doesn't translate well into a general purpose CPU, you're going to want hardware for it. The biggest example is various hardware components in GPUs such as hardware raseterisation. FPGAs are an entire class of chips dedicated to being programmable fixed-function hardware accelerators. For more information, you can checkout this wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_acceleration
This obviously makes sense that direct hardware implementations will out perform their software "mimicked" counterparts. These fixed function hardwares are becoming very popular in mobile devices, especially in terms of photography! I wonder if we will also see them begin to spread to laptops and desktop computers as well. Potentially VR will see the use of fixed function hardware as well due to faster execution times needed because of the display latency.
Fixed function hardware has been around in computers forever, actually. If you know you're going to do always do an operation that doesn't translate well into a general purpose CPU, you're going to want hardware for it. The biggest example is various hardware components in GPUs such as hardware raseterisation. FPGAs are an entire class of chips dedicated to being programmable fixed-function hardware accelerators. For more information, you can checkout this wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_acceleration