[HN Gopher] The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
___________________________________________________________________
The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
Author : wmf
Score : 174 points
Date : 2025-05-20 17:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.dshr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.dshr.org)
| pjmlp wrote:
| I wanted to buy a Voodoo card, and due to PCI incompatible
| version, had to trade it back for a Riva TNT.
|
| Back then I was quite p***d not being able to keep the Voodoo,
| how little did I know how it was going to turn out.
| stewarts wrote:
| We hold you singularly responsible for the eventual failure of
| the Voodoo3/4/5 and Nvidia domination.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sorry.... :)
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I had a Riva TNT at the time, and a friend's Voodoo... 2? sure
| ran Half-Life better than my card. The Voodoo 2 probably really
| was the better GPU at the time. Later games required later APIs
| (unsupported by older cards) - and much higher performance -
| anyway, so longevity was not much either way.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| No mention of SGI.
| wmf wrote:
| AFAIK the SGI-Nvidia connection was after DSHR's time.
| jandrese wrote:
| I thought the majority of SGI's contribution was braindead
| management decisions that caused the good engineers to leave
| and form nVidia.
| rjsw wrote:
| I still have a NV1 card.
| christkv wrote:
| Me too i also have a rendition verite card which i guess in
| some ways is the first real fully programmable consumer gpu as
| it has a risc processor.
| rjsw wrote:
| I also have an even older NEC ISA card with a TI TMS34010
| chip [1], that was a programmable CPU/GPU.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010
| christkv wrote:
| Oh yeah I remember those but did they ever get used for any
| games on the PC platform? I know they were used in multiple
| arcade machines.
| mrandish wrote:
| This kind of retrospective from key people who were involved is
| invaluable from an historical perspective. I find hearing first-
| hand accounts of the context, assumptions, thought processes,
| internal debates, technical limitations, business realities and
| even dumb luck a good way to not only understand how we got here
| but how to do as well (or better) going forward.
|
| While the nitty gritty detail of recollections captured when
| still fresh in memory can be fascinating, I especially appreciate
| reflections written a few decades later as it allows putting the
| outcomes of key decisions in perspective, as well as generally
| enabling more frank assessments thanks to fewer business and
| personal concerns.
| rhdjsjebshjffn wrote:
| I'm excited about this too, but it's a little concerning
| there's a brand in the title. There's no shortage of those from
| ati, intel, amd, apple, ibm, the game gaggle, etc to interview.
| The fact that nvidia succeeded where others failed is largely
| an artifact of luck.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Nvidia's Cg language made developers prefer their hardware,
| I'd say.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which influenced HLSL, with their close collaboration with
| Microsoft on DirectX.
| mrandish wrote:
| > largely an artifact of luck.
|
| I disagree with "largely". Luck is _always_ a factor in
| business success and there are certainly some notable
| examples where luck was, arguably, a big enough factor that
| "largely" would apply - like Broadcast.com's sale to Yahoo
| right at the peak of the .com bubble. However, I'm not aware
| of evidence luck was any more of a factor in NVidia's success
| than the ambient environmental constant it always is for
| every business. Luck is like the wind in competitive sailing
| - it impacts everyone, sometimes positively, sometimes
| negatively.
|
| Achieving and then sustaining substantial success over the
| long run requires making a lot of choices correctly as well
| as top notch execution. The key is doing all of that so
| consistently and repeatedly that you survive long enough for
| the good and bad luck to cancel each other out. NVidia now
| has over 30 years of history through multiple industry-wide
| booms, downturns and fundamental technology transitions - a
| consistent track record of substantial, sustained success so
| long that good luck can't plausibly be a significant factor.
|
| That said, to me, this article didn't try to explain NVidia's
| long-term business success. It focused on a few key
| architectural decisions made early on which were, arguably,
| quite risky in that they could have wasted a lot of
| development on capabilities which didn't end up mattering.
| However, they did end up paying off and, to me, the valuable
| insight was that key team members came from a different
| background than their competitors and their experiences with
| multi-user, multi-tasking, virtualized mini and mainframe
| architectures caused them to believe desktop architectures
| would evolve in that direction sooner rather than later. The
| takeaway being akin to "skate to where the puck is going, not
| where it is." In rapidly evolving tech environments, making
| such predictions is greatly improved when the team has both
| breadth and depth of experience in relevant domains.
| voidspark wrote:
| Concerned about a "brand in the title"? What do you expect?
|
| The author is David Rosenthal, who was employee #4 at Nvidia
| (Chief Scientist).
|
| He's not some random historian or interviewer. That's his
| life experience.
| jandrese wrote:
| I would say nVidia made their own luck. A lot of their
| success can be attributed to their management never losing
| sight of the fact that the software is just as important as
| the hardware. Both drivers and CUDA are key to nVidia's
| success. ATI and nVidia would trade places on quality of
| hardware, but there was never a question on the software
| side.
| rhdjsjebshjffn wrote:
| I'm not sure how nvidia's driver track record would have
| _helped_ them, but drivers nor linux nor software in any
| way has ever really been nvidia 's strong-suit. but even
| with the popularity of it CUDA cannot explain nvidia's
| success alone; you also need the demand of butcoin and the
| secondary-but-farcical imitation of LLMs but also the
| inexplicable lack of awareness of alternatives that need
| explaining...
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I worked on CUDA and OpenCL in the 2010-2014 timeframe,
| well before buttcoin and LLMs were profit centers, and
| Nvidia was already well ahead in the "GPUs as general
| compute" area. Literally everyone doing highly parallel
| HPC wanted to use Nvidia, despite AMD having higher
| throughout for some workloads. It was better, easier to
| use software.
| WJW wrote:
| I'll add to that: even though it is true that "drivers
| nor linux nor software in any way has ever really been
| nvidia's strong-suit", as GP put it, their software was
| _still_ miles ahead of its competitors. In the land of
| the blind a one-eyed man is king, and all that.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I definitely recall Nvidia cards were consistently priced
| higher than AMD cards of the equivalent hardware as early
| as 2011.
|
| So judging by actions, not words, they had a clear
| software/firmware advantage by then already.
| FabHK wrote:
| The author worked at Nvidia and explains some of the
| engineering decisions made at the time. Why shouldn't the
| brand be in the title?
| killme2008 wrote:
| Really fascinating story--thanks for sharing! Graphics
| programming has been a major driving force behind the widespread
| adoption of object-oriented programming, and the abstraction of
| devices in this context is truly elegant.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > At a time when PC memory maxed out at 640 megabytes,
|
| Pretty sure the author meant write 640 _kilobytes_.
| rjsw wrote:
| Maybe that is what they were thinking but anything designed to
| work with a PCI bus would have been introduced after PCs became
| capable of using more memory than that.
| usefulcat wrote:
| It's hard to tell exactly what time frame the author is
| referencing there. For context, NV1 was released in '95, by
| which time it was not uncommon for a new PC to have 8-16 MB of
| memory (I had a 486 with 16 MB by '94). Especially if you
| planned to use it for gaming.
| npalli wrote:
| The sentence and paragraph which makes it clear that this was
| megabytes and not kilobytes
|
| _At a time when PC memory maxed out at 640 megabytes, the fact
| that the PCI bus could address 4 gigabytes meant that quite a
| few of its address bits were surplus. So we decided to increase
| the amount of data shipped in each bus cycle by using some of
| them as data. IIRC NV1 used 23 address bits, occupying 1 /512th
| of the total space. 7 of the 23 selected one of the 128 virtual
| FIFOs, allowing 128 different processes to share access to the
| hardware. We figured 128 processes was plenty._
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Okay but "640" is a completely fictitious number for
| installed RAM in any given PC.
|
| PC memory was nearly always sold in powers of two. So you
| could have SIMMs in capacity of 1MiB, 2MiB, 4, 8, 16MiB. You
| could usually mix-and-match these memory modules, and some
| PCs had 2 slots, some had 4, some had a different number of
| slots.
|
| So if you think about 4 slots that can hold some sort of
| maximum, we're thinking 64MiB is a very common maximum for a
| consumer PC, and that may be 2x32 or 4x16MiB. Lots of people
| ran up against that limit for sure.
|
| 640MiB is an absurd number if you think mathematically. How
| do you divide that up? If 4 SIMMs are installed, then their
| capacity is 160MiB each? No such hardware ever existed. IIRC,
| individual SIMMs were commonly maxed at 64MiB, and it was not
| physically possible to make a "monster memory module" larger
| than that.
|
| Furthermore, while 64MiB requires 26 bits to address, 640MiB
| requires 30 address bits on the bus. If a hypothetical PC had
| 640MiB in use by the OS, then only _2 pins_ would be unused
| on the address bus! That is clearly at odds with their
| narrative that they were able to "borrow" several more!
|
| This is clearly a typo and I would infer that the author
| meant to write "64 megabytes" and tacked on an extra zero,
| out of habit or hyperbole.
| chadaustin wrote:
| You are straight up wrong. The first computer I ever built
| was a Pentium 2, RivaTNT, and it had 640 MB RAM.
|
| I can't find the purchase receipts or specific board brand
| but it had four SDRAM slots, and I had it populated with
| 2x64 and 2x256.
|
| Edit: Found it in some old files of mine:
|
| I was wrong! Not four DIMM slots... three! One must have
| been 128 and the other two 256. Pentium II
| 400, 512k cache Abit BF6 motherboard 640 MB
| PC100 SDRAM 21" Sony CPD-G500 (19.8" viewable, .24
| dot pitch) 17" ViewSonic monitor (16" viewable, .27
| dot pitch) RivaTNT PCI video card with 16 MB VRAM
| Creative SB Live! Creative 5x DVD, 32x CD drive
| Sony CD-RW (2, 4, 24) 80 GB Western Digital ATA/100
| 40 GB Western Digital ATA/100 17.2 GB Maxtor
| UltraDMA/33 HDD 10.0 GB Maxtor UltraDMA/33 HDD
| Cambridge SoundWorks FourPointSurround FPS2000 Digital
| 3Com OfficeConnect 10/100 EtherNet card 3 Microsoft
| SideWinder Gamepads Labtec AM-252 Microphone
| Promise IDE Controller card Hauppage WinTV-Theatre
| Tuner Card
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Alright then! Humbly, I stand corrected about my poor
| speculation without research. It looks like 640MiB has
| been a perfectly achievable configuration, especially
| with 2x256+2x64 or such. That is, I must say, a huge
| amount of RAM. Like, way more than any video game ever
| specified in HW requirements. What use cases applied that
| you could use up 640MiB in that era, I wouldn't know!
|
| I remain a bit mystified about why it would be a hard
| maximum, though. Did such motherboards prevent the user
| from installing 4x256MiB for a cool 1GiB of DRAM? Was the
| OS having trouble addressing or utilizing it all? 640MiB
| is not a mathematical sort of maximum I was familiar with
| from the late 1990s. 4GiB is obviously your upper limit,
| with a 32-bit address bus... and again, if 640MiB were
| installed, that's only 2 free bits on that bus.
|
| So I'm still a little curious about this number being
| dropped in the article. More info would be enlightening!
| And thank you for speaking up to correct me! No wonder it
| was down-voted!
| chadaustin wrote:
| I did a bunch of media and software development back then
| so RAM helped a lot. Why 640? Not sure. My particular
| board could have gone up to 768. I did some googling and
| found some boards that maxed out at 1 GB.
|
| That was a weird time in computing. Things were getting
| fast and big quickly (not that many years later, I built
| a dual-socket Xeon at 2.8 GHz, and before that my brother
| had a dual socket P3 at 700 MHz.) but all the expansion
| boards were so special-purpose. I remember going out of
| my way to pick a board with something like seven
| expansion slots.
|
| But I think your question about why the author said 640
| is fair! Maybe they had a machine like mine around then.
| Or maybe it's something NVIDIA was designing around?
| tolien wrote:
| > I remain a bit mystified about why it would be a hard
| maximum, though. Did such motherboards prevent the user
| from installing 4x256MiB for a cool 1GiB of DRAM?
|
| Probably not - it's not that rare to see the supported
| maximum memory be a function of the biggest DIMM you can
| buy, I guess as a reflection of the biggest configuration
| the manufacturer could test.
| trentnelson wrote:
| Oh man, the Abit motherboards! That takes me back. How
| much did this cost and at what time? Presume very late
| 90s.
| chadaustin wrote:
| Looks like '97. Unfortunately I can't find the receipts!
| If I had to guess, I think I'd say somewhere around $2000
| in all. That computer lasted me a LONG time. When it was
| done being a desktop, it became a Linux server until I
| sold it around 2009. Sometimes I wish I'd kept it: the
| Pentium 2 was such an important CPU and I smile every
| time I see the one on display in the Computer History
| Museum.
| Clamchop wrote:
| The article is a touch confusing, but I'm pretty sure I
| agree that they meant the 640 kilobyte limit of the OG PC
| architecture. The Pentium II dates from 1997, the NV1 to
| 1995, and the new PCI bus with its whopping 32-bits to
| 1992. 640MiB would have been a prodigious amount of
| memory at the time of launch.
|
| I don't think any mathematical relationship between the
| address bus and either 640KiB or 640MiB was intended, it
| was just the anchor point for how huge 4GiB of addressing
| was viewed at the time.
|
| The article then goes on to say that the NV1 used 23 bits
| of the address bus but adds in the next paragraph that 16
| bits remained to use for data. That math isn't working
| out for me.
|
| Actually, I'm really struggling to understand how this
| scheme would work at all. It strongly implies open
| addressing with no other MMIO devices to conflict with,
| but that's just not how I thought PCI worked. Maybe
| someone who knows more can explain it to me.
| npalli wrote:
| My reading was 640MiB was seen as some extraordinary
| upper bound that was unlikely to be breached in 1995
| leaving lot of bits of the address bus for NV1 for quite
| some time. The 640 KiB seems definitely not a limit as
| even IBM PC/AT released in 1984! had an upper limit of
| 16MiB. So, as NV1's designer you could not assume 640KiB
| was some sort of upper bound on PC's of 1995 when
| designing the scheme. As to why 640MiB and not something
| else, I believe Windows 95 could address 2GB in theory
| but would start becoming unstable around 512MiB so maybe
| he chose 640MiB.
|
| The whole thing a bit ironic since Bill Gates took great
| pains to say he never said 640KiB is all you need (or
| something like that). Given my example of the IBM PC/AT
| it definitely was not common understanding of upper
| limits in 1995 apocryphal or not.
| Clamchop wrote:
| Yeah, I dunno. Besides being a lot for 1995, the address
| space stuff, if taken at face value, means you'd only
| have to knick 3 bits off before starting to eat into it.
| Shrug
| jandrese wrote:
| To make this easy, there was no overlap between when
| 640kb was common on PCs and when nVidia existed as a
| company.
| adrian_b wrote:
| By 1995, PCI had vanquished VL-Bus and a cheap entry PC
| would have had a PCI bus and a 486 CPU at 66 MHz or 100
| MHz with 8 MB of RAM, while a decent PC would have had a
| Pentium with 16 MB of RAM.
|
| The days of 640 kB memory were long forgotten.
|
| Even in 1990, a decent PC would have had a 386 CPU with 4
| MB of RAM, which would have been used as extended memory
| by the MS-DOS programs, while the cheapest computers
| would have been PC/XT clones with a NEC V20 CPU and with
| 2 MB of expanded memory, so still well beyond the 640 kB.
| accrual wrote:
| Impressive build, probably sounded pretty wild upon
| startup with 4x ATA drives!
| chadaustin wrote:
| It did, especially as the drives got older and shrieky.
| Plus the floppy and optical drives spinning up. But...
| funny story, when I moved to Silicon Valley, SSDs didn't
| exist yet, but compile times were IO-bound. So my company
| bought everyone Dell workstations with two 15k RPM SAS
| drives in RAID 0. When I'd kick off a build, the desk
| would start vibrating under my fingers.
|
| It made everything feel real!
|
| Later, the company switched new employees to 3x 10,000
| RPM SATA drives. Not quite as grindy, but still loud.
| userbinator wrote:
| For a while, I had 36MB on a 486 mobo, with a combination
| of SIMMs and DIMMs. As others have mentioned, 640MB is a
| valid, if odd, configuration for RAM.
| rasz wrote:
| Not a single 486 motherboard supported DIMMs.
| adrian_b wrote:
| As another poster has said, around 2000/2001 there were
| many PC motherboards for which the maximum RAM capacity was
| 640 MB of SDRAM (though depending on the motherboard the
| capacity limit could have other values, e.g. 512 MB or 768
| MB were other frequent values). Only around 2003,
| motherboards where you could install up to 4 GB of DDR
| memory became widespread.
|
| I had a few such motherboards, with Pentium III
| "Coppermine" and with AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" (with 3 DIMM
| sockets, 2 accepting 256 MB modules and 1 accepting 128 MB
| modules).
|
| While I had initially equipped them with less memory, i.e.
| either 128 MB or 256 MB, because of the high cost at that
| time, eventually I had maxed up the installed memory to 640
| MB on the Athlon motherboards.
|
| At that time, the memory controller was not included in the
| CPU, but it was contained in an external chip, the
| Northbridge. The MB chipsets could come from various
| vendors, including Intel and Via. Depending on the chipset,
| different maximum amounts of SDRAM could be supported.
| Sometimes there were also limits for the maximum amount of
| RAM caused by the L2 cache controller, due to the size of
| the tags required in cache lines. Even with the same
| chipset, the MB manufacturer could choose to route
| different numbers of address lines to the sockets, probably
| depending on whether the extra capacitive loading caused by
| a bigger memory module would have allowed it to function at
| the rated speed on that PCB.
|
| 64 MB would have been a typical maximum memory around 1998
| (2 sockets for 32 MB SDRAM modules, on a MB with an AGP
| socket for the graphics card), so if the author would have
| had that year in mind, you would be right.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Haven't you ever heard the Bill Gates quote that he didn't
| actually say?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120477
|
| https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/mpjS-h
| 4...
|
| QUESTION: I read in a newspaper that in 1981 you said,
| ``640K of memory should be enough for anybody.'' What did
| you mean when you said this?
|
| ANSWER: I've said some stupid things and some wrong things,
| but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say
| that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.
|
| The need for memory increases as computers get more potent
| and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of
| years the amount of memory address space needed to run
| whatever software is mainstream at the time just about
| doubles. This is well-known.
|
| When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked
| Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit
| computers, which had 64K of address space, would last
| forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great
| 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit
| computers.
|
| We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit
| computers, which had 640K of available address space, would
| be adequate for only four or five years. (The IBM PC had 1
| megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was
| assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory
| available. That's where the now-infamous ``640K barrier''
| came from.)
|
| A few years later, Microsoft was a big fan of Intel's 386
| microprocessor chip, which gave computers a 32-bit address
| space.
|
| Modern operating systems can now take advantage of that
| seemingly vast potential memory. But even 32 bits of
| address space won't prove adequate as time goes on.
|
| Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation
| attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough.
| There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a
| rumor, repeated again and again.
| artyom wrote:
| This reads as one of the many engineering marvel stories (e.g.
| Bell Labs, Xerox) where revolutionary technology is created by a
| combination of (a) clever engineers with enough "free" time, and
| (b) no clueless managers around.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| You can read in Kernighans History of Unix that really good
| managers - "enlightened management" IIRC - were involved and
| not just involved, some of them were absolutely crucial or Unix
| won't have existed. It's not like you can just let loose a
| couple of big brains and things will work out fine. They won't
| (and didn't).
| jacobgorm wrote:
| I remember sitting next to David Rosenthal at a conference
| reception (must have been FAST, which makes sense given his
| involvement with LOCKSS) in San Jose some time around 2010 or
| 2011, not knowing up front who he was. He explained some of the
| innovations he had made at NVIDIA around making the hardware more
| modular and easier for parallel teams to work on, and we chatted
| about the rumors I had heard about SUN thinking about licensing
| the Amiga hardware, which he confirmed but said would have been a
| bad idea, because the hardware didn't support address space
| protection. I guess I didn't know enough about him or NVIDIA to
| be sufficiently impressed at the time, but he was a very friendly
| and down to earth person.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| That's right, he's a great down-to-earth guy (but he can still
| write like a passionate punk rocker -- see below), and there's
| a wealth of interesting thoughtful stuff on his blog. I've
| known him since the days of the X10 / X11 / NeWS window system
| wars.
|
| He worked with James Gosling on Andrew at CMU and NeWS at Sun,
| and on X10 as well as X11 and ICCCM, and he implemented the
| original X10 compatibility layer that was in NeWS 1.0, before
| X11 was a "thing".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal
|
| One of my favorite classics is his Recreational Bugs talk
| [1989] by "Sgt." David Rosenthal (author of the ICCCM,
| developer of the Andrew Window Manager, X10, X11, and NeWS,
| employee #4 and chief scientist at Nvidia):
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2018/05/recreational-bugs.html
|
| >"You will get a better Gorilla effect if you use as big a
| piece of paper as possible." -Kunihiko Kasahara, Creative
| Origami.
|
| Here's his review of "The Philosopher of Palo Alto", a book
| about Mark Weiser:
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2023/06/the-philosopher-of-palo-alto.h...
|
| At the 1985 Alvey Workshop "Methodology of Window Management",
| David Rosenthal and James Gosling presented "System Aspects of
| Low-Cost Bitmapped Displays" and "A Window Manager for
| Bitmapped Displays and Unix" about their work on Andrew at CMU.
| And James presented "SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible
| Window System" about his work at Sun, which was later renamed
| NeWS, and was what convinced David to leave CMU and join him at
| Sun.
|
| System Aspects of Low-Cost Bitmapped Displays:
|
| https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm...
|
| A Window Manager for Bitmapped Displays and Unix (with the
| first known use of the term "Gorilla effect" as it applies to
| computer graphics):
|
| https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm...
|
| SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System:
|
| https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm...
|
| Warren Teitelman's "Ten Years of Window Systems - A
| Retrospective View" covers the fascinating history of
| Smalltalk, DLisp (Interlisp), Interlisp-D, Tajo (Mesa
| Development Environment), Docs (Cedar), Viewers (Cedar),
| SunWindows and SunDew systems:
|
| https://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm...
|
| Here's David Rosenthal's notorious Sun Deskset Environment
| flame that some rogue leaked to the Unix-Haters mailing list
| (inspiring the Unix-Haters Handbook's X-Windows chapter), in
| which he poignantly concluded:
|
| "It's like having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom
| wall.": From: DR Date: 18 Oct 90
| 17:02:39 GMT Newsgroups: sun.open-windows
| Subject: Re: Deskset environment [NS replied to
| me directly. Her reply illustrates the reasons why
| I sent out yesterday's mail so perfectly that I'm
| taking the liberty of copying my reply to
| openwindows-interest] > When we give standard
| Deskset presentations, a couple of > things tend to
| "dazzle" the audience ... > > 1. Use the MT
| Calendar template to generate an > appointment.
| Mail it to yourself, then > drop it onto CM which
| will schedule it. The > template is totally
| hokey (we're working on > it) but it works and is
| wizzy. > > 2. Build a small application with
| GUIDE and make it > on the spot. Show it up and
| running on XView > in minutes. You can talk to
| BW about that > Thank you, but you have
| completely missed the point. I don't want to show
| people how whizzy the standard default desktop
| environment is. That's your job. I want to give a
| talk about a quite different subject. I merely want to
| *use* the desktop environment to achieve my own ends.
| And as soon as I try to actually *use* it for something
| instead of merely showing off the glitz, it falls to
| pieces in my hands. Unfortunately, this is becoming all
| too common in Sun products these days, because we no longer
| *use* the things we build for anything but whizzy demos.
| Have you ever actually tried to *use* the desktop for
| anything? Like, say, printing a PostScript file? The
| answer has to be no - because dropping a PostScript file on
| the print tool doesn't work. Or binding a shell command to
| a pattern? Again no, because doing so depends on
| undocumented features of /etc/filetype. Even trying to
| create a new icon from the standard set causes the icon
| editor to dump core. I'm not joking when I say that I've
| been filing a bug report every couple of hours of trying to
| use the desktop. Its this kind of fragility that shows me
| that I'm treading on fresh snow. No-one else has walked
| this way. And that is a truly sad commentary on
| the state of Sun - no-one has been this way because no-
| one believes that there's anything worth doing over
| this way. The reason Unix was such an advance over
| previous operating systems was that you could customize
| your environment in arbitrary ways. With just a few
| shell scripts, for example. Its just like the cold war
| - in our anxiety to compete with the enemy we've ended
| up losing the things that made our way of life worth
| defending in the first place. Like the freedom to
| disagree with the authorities. > I believe you're
| correct in saying that most people live > with the
| default environment, but I think it's only partly >
| because they don't know how to customize it. We've done
| > some user testing and, surprisingly, people either prefer
| > the default environment or just don't want to take the
| > time to make it special. This is particularly true of
| > people like admins, marketing, etc. Testing
| whether people actually do customize their environment
| is beside the point. Of course they don't. In order
| to do it, I have to write C code using bizarre features
| of Xview, exercise all my shell wizardry, and dredge up
| undocumented features of the system from the source.
| And you're suprised when admins can't do this? I don't
| expect admins to do it. But I do expect ISVs and Sun's
| SEs to be able to do it, and right now they can't.
| PS - I notice that someone filed a bug today pointing out
| that even your example of dropping a mail message on CM
| doesn't work if CM is closed. That's a symptom of the kind
| of arrogance that all the deskset tools seem to show -
| they're so whizzy and important that they deserve acres of
| screen real estate. Why can't they just shut up and do
| their job efficiently and inconspicuously? Why do they have
| to shove their bells and whistles in my face all the time?
| They're like 50's American cars - huge and covered with
| fins. What I want is more like a BMW, small, efficient,
| elegant and understated. Your focus on the whizzy demos may
| look great at trade shows, but who wants to have their tools
| screaming at them for attention all the time? It's like
| having a Roy Lichtenstein painting on your bedroom wall.
| Animats wrote:
| That's from the period when there was no standardization of how
| the CPU talked to the graphics device. Triangles or quads? Shared
| memory or command queues? DMA from the CPU side or the graphics
| device side? Graphics as part of the CPU/memory system or as part
| of the display system? Can the GPU cause page faults which are
| serviced by the virtual memory system?
|
| Now we have Vulkan. Vulkan standardizes some things, but has a
| huge number of options because hardware design decisions are
| exposed at the Vulkan interface. You can transfer data from CPU
| to GPU via DMA or via shared memory. Memory can be mapped for
| bidirectional transfer, or for one-way transfer in either
| direction. Such transfers are slower than normal memory accesses.
| You can ask the GPU to read textures from CPU memory because GPU
| memory is full, which also carries a performance penalty. Or you
| can be on an "integrated graphics" machine where CPU and GPU
| share the same memory. Most hardware offers some, but not all, of
| those options.
|
| This is why a lot of stuff still uses OpenGL, which hides all
| that.
|
| (I spent a few years writing AutoCAD drivers for devices now best
| forgotten, and later trying to get 3D graphics to work on PCs in
| the 1990s. I got to see a lot of graphics boards best forgotten.)
| saltcured wrote:
| And that was an evolution of earlier 2D cards where you had a
| potential mixture of CPU-addressable framebuffer and various
| I/O ports to switch modes between text and raster graphics,
| adjust video modes in DACs, adjust color palette lookup tables,
| load fonts for text modes, and maybe address some 2D
| coprocessors for things like "blitting" (kind of like
| rectangular 2D DMA), line drawing, or even some basic polygonal
| rendering with funny options like dithering or stipple
| shading...
| userbinator wrote:
| It all started with the 8514/A... and maybe a bit of the VGA
| too.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And that is because of that low level exposure, and extension
| spaghetti, that Khronos finally acknowledged at Vulkanised 2025
| that adoption didn't went on as expected, and there is now a
| roadmap being put into place on how to improve the whole
| situation.
|
| The talk being "The Road to The Future".
| Animats wrote:
| Just looked at that roadmap.[1] Good to know they are
| thinking about that.
|
| I've discussed this in the context of Rust renderers. There
| are about four of them, and they all sit on top of Vulkan and
| export roughly similar APIs. The API is roughly comparable to
| three.js - meshes, textures, materials, lights, shadows, and
| updating are supported. They all get to the point where they
| can load static glTF scenes, and then the devs hit the hard
| concurrency problems and bail.
|
| That's a much more comfortable level for users who need to
| get something done in 3D. Vulkan level belongs to people who
| write engines.
|
| Getting off topic, though. This is not a retro problem. This
| is a current problem.
|
| Further discussion on the Vulkan roadmap request for comments
| on Discord, here.[2]
|
| [1] https://vulkan.org/user/pages/09.events/vulkanised-2025/T
| 2-T...
|
| [2] https://discord.com/channels/427551838099996672/115155677
| 637...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Did you ever play around with the Matrox Digisuite SDK for
| DirectX for real time video processing, that had a visual data
| flow programming language interface for its video processing
| nodes that would execute inside the gpu?
|
| https://video.matrox.com/en/about/history-of-innovation
|
| >1996: Matrox launches the Matrox Genesis Series vision
| processor, and with its highly pipelined, parallel-processing
| architecture, establishes a new performance industry standard.
|
| >The company also introduces Matrox DigiSuite, the first
| affordable all-digital system for real-time, non-linear
| editing. The award-winning DigiSuite breaks new ground in
| offering a full set of professional-quality editing and effects
| capabilities. DigiSuite becomes the world's best-selling
| professional video editing card.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| > all an application could do was to invoke methods on virtual
| objects .. the application could not know whether the object was
| implemented in hardware or in the resource manager's software.
| The flexibility to make this decision at any time was a huge
| advantage. As Kim quotes Michael Hara as saying:
|
| > "This was the most brilliant thing on the planet. It was our
| secret sauce. If we missed a feature or a feature was broken, we
| could put it in the resource manager and it would work."
|
| Absolutely brilliant. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of
| your tech (slow/updateable software vs fast/frozen hardware) then
| design the product so a missed deadline won't sink the company. A
| perfect combo of technically savvy management and clever
| engineering.
| tiahura wrote:
| Talk by Erik Lindholm (now retired), on Riva 128 and many of the
| other early Nvidia cards:
| https://ubc.ca.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=880a...
| djmips wrote:
| Thanks!
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I stopped reading right here:
|
| > Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the
| world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling
| the genius of Jensen Huang,
|
| Yeah, he's a real genius. (Sarcasm). He is a marking guy, there
| is no genius behind this man.
|
| The fact that Nvidia uses its market position cause harm to the
| industry by strong-arming partners to toe the line makes this
| company a problem, just like all the others. They operate like
| any other predatory corporation.
| jwmcq wrote:
| Probably read the rest? I did not see Jensen's name on any of
| the patents that this key engineer discusses the detail and
| rationale of, and I feel that those names are listed fairly
| deliberately.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > He is a marking guy,
|
| You would be wrong. He worked at AMD as a design engineer, and
| later went to LSI logic helping customers put out custom ASICs.
| One of his customers, a big customer, was Sun, helping with
| their SPARC processor and the GX graphics chips, and no doubt
| many others.
|
| In 1989-1991 I did three ASICs at LSI Logic -- and Jensen was
| my liason there on the latter two. He was incredibly smart,
| hard working, technically knowledgeable, kind, patient, and
| generous with his time despite being very busy.
|
| The marketing stuff came later (or maybe said better: it was
| latent and it came out later)
| trinsic2 wrote:
| If he is an engineer he sure doesn't sound like it with his
| keynote address. The guy spends more time on AI than talking
| about how they plan on improve technology and their
| relationship with their partners.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| The Nvidia of the late 90s died once they realized people
| wanted compute on a video card.
| Netcob wrote:
| Interesting that the bus bandwidth was such a bottleneck, when
| you could also argue it was VRAM. I never looked into why
| "Hardware transform&lighting" was introduced so late (I'm
| guessing it didn't fit on the die next to the rasterization
| stuff?), but I think hardware t&l combined with storing geometry
| in VRAM would have reduced bus usage to a minimum.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Bruce Factor and Curtis Priem developed a flight simulator called
| Aviator for Sun's S-Bus GX graphics accelerator. I had one of
| them on my SS2, and owned a copy of Aviator on CDROM, and loved
| to play it.
|
| It was one of the earliest Sun games distributed with a free
| playable demo that you could unlock by buying a license key. It
| would let you play for a minute or so and then the simulation
| would stop abruptly. That inspired me to do the same thing with
| SimCity for the Sun: you could play for a few minutes, then the
| simulator would switch to a cellular automata that would scramble
| your city, until you bought a license key to unlock it.
|
| The GX was an 8-bit display, so it uses a 256 color palette, and
| drew shaded colors by halftone stippling. You can clearly see
| that in this video:
|
| Aviator 1.5.1 running on SunOS 4.1.4 on a Sparcstation 20
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQscDJCy4c
|
| Aviator had "aircraftcap" file in the format of (yech) a termcap
| file, that allowed you to configure your aircraft, and several
| fighter aircraft, small planes, and a 747 were included.
|
| I heard a story about a fighter pilot who played Aviator, but he
| noticed something was wonky about how a plane he was familiar
| with flew. So he too a look at the aircraftcap file, and was able
| to find the problem, tweak it, and then it flew much more to his
| satisfaction!
|
| You could dogfight over the network, and the sneaky thing to do
| was to hack your aircraftcap file to mount your guided missiles
| far behind you fighter jet, so when somebody was on your tail,
| you could shoot them in the ass!
|
| Software in silicon: the methodology behind Sun's GX graphics
| accelerator architecture:
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/63673
|
| Sun GX Series Graphics Workstations:
|
| https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc01...
|
| AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES
| MARKET (July 8 1991):
|
| https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/aviator_15_for_sun_netwo...
|
| SGI Users Group Forum: "Aviator" - a flight sim program for Sun
| GX - does anyone have this installed? Can anyone run it and get
| screenshots or video?
|
| https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/aviator-a-flight-sim...
|
| Vintage Computer Federation Forums: The "Aviator" flight sim for
| Sun GX hardware (e.g. SPARCstations)
|
| https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/the-aviator-flight...
|
| Reddit: A request to owners of Sun GX hardware such as
| SPARCstations: Can anyone post screenshots or footage from the
| late 80s/early 90s flight sim "Aviator"?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/y9zfhs/a_...
| muziq wrote:
| Roundabout when NVIDIA breached 3T USD and ousted Apple from #1
| spot: "That is a long way from Curtis Priem's kitchen table, a
| $2.5M A-round from Sutter Hill and Sequoia, and the NV1."
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