I'm afraid you're still an idiot, because "the stuff that turns the driver into a product" should still also be no greater than a few MB tops, even with stupid sounds, images and animations included for the printer status.

Here I go feeding the trolls...

So just so I can get this right, a printer driver is so complex a feat of engineering it is analogous to a skyscraper? A printer driver takes input data in the form of text, fonts, and images, formatting, and translates it into a format compatible with the printer in question. Entire operating systems have been written in less than 1/10th the size of some of HP's modern shipping print drivers. I never said it has to be 254 bytes, but the current level of bloat is absolutely insane and I have no idea how they even reach it. Do you know how many lines of C++ code 500MB compiled and compressed is actually equivalent to? Billions. Literally billions. I just want to understand; Do you actually believe it takes a billion lines of code to transform input document data into a format readable by a laser printer?

Then you should be impressed. If you seriously are a developer who writes printer software for HP you are bad and you should feel bad.

Why, yes I am! I've written home-brew Xbox games that included graphics and animations, sounds and music(<10MB), and reasonably complicated network software that runs as a service on many of my servers at work (<100KB). I've dabbled in writing demo code as well writing a complex synthesizer with DSP effects and tons of music content in 64kb.

If you're actually defending the need to ship printer drivers literally over 500MB I would really love to hear your logic.

The next time you churn your next 500MB printer driver think about programs like this. Think long and hard.

Sigh. Here I go feeding the trolls.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, since MY main point in the rest of this topic was that modern GPUs are mostly limited by memory bandwidth, which makes the development in TFA pretty pointless. You're right! 32GB/s isn't enough to make the most of the computing resources available on a modern GPU! That was my point; How exactly would the GPU accessing main memory directly help? The fastest system RAM currently available in consumer markets in the fastest possible configuration can barely reach 30GB/s. In order for GPUs to confer a computional advantage they need to be doing heavy lifting on GDDR RAM which could deliver over 160GB/s on cards that are over 4 years old.

Yeah, that's about right. I was just quoting from the OP there. An application that was already properly optimized on the CPU generally only sees performance gains of around 10 to 20x in best case scenarios.

Wrong! The GPU is only 100x faster at doing certain problems because of the fast GDDR memory it is attached to which is optimized for very large sequential reads and writes. There are a tiny number of applications that require huge numbers of FLOPs on very small amounts of data (BitCoin mining and password hashing attacks come to mind, but that's about it.)

The "slow interconnect" you're talking about to main memory, PCI Express v3.0 has an effective bandwidth of 32GB/s which actually exceeds the best main memory bandwidth you'd get out of an Ivy Bridge CPU with very fast memory, so no, that's not a bottleneck for bandwidth, though yes, there is some latency there.

I don't know why everyone seems to forget that GPUs aren't just fast because they have a lot of ALUs (TFA included), they are fast because of the highly specialized GDDR memory they are attached to. One would be completely useless without the other. Even the lowly GTX 285 from 4 years ago was pushing 160GB/s for memory bandwidth.

One question they never seem to answer is why bother unifying the memory architecture at all? CPU and GPU memory architectures have always been different for the same reasons that CPUs and GPUs themselves are different; one is designed for fast execution of serial instructions with corresponding random smaller reads and writes to memory, and the other is designed for fast execution of parallel instructions with corresponding contiguous reads and writes that are much larger in size. It seems like you're just going to to ending compromising if you try to shoehorn one onto the other.

That makes no sense to me. Large amounts of cash seem like a pretty legitimate use for a secret compartment in a car, in many neighborhoods throughout the US. The only way an ordinary citizen could have a large amount of cash is obviously through illegal means? I guess we really were never supposed to win.

I would add to this that we're also on the cusp of considerably improved TV technology with affordable OLED displays around the corner in the next few years. If you can hold out now you'll be able to get much much nicer TVs than what you can buy today for the money.

Actually, not really. 95% of what you see what you see when you look at a high yield weapon like a modern ICBM is devoted to getting the warhead to the destination, the warhead itself is a tiny fraction of the overall size and weight.

They wanted a living-room presence for their software. It doesn't sound like a big deal now, but 10 years ago it was. Someone probably pitched their ability to leverage their existing investment in Direct-X, both as a platform for games development and with the existing investments made into that platform by partners (easy ports).