If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.

There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.

(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)

Yeah well, we can't all be a person who doesn't understand how things work. Kudos to you for being simple minded!

" The Kathmandu Post"

Ah we don't to pay for journalism, says a planet of suckers

Oh, that's pretty neat. Microsoft is definitely the right level to address this at - they already have permission to enumerate the HW, own the hardware and software infra to tackle this, enjoy economy of scale other players are not privvy too, and can deliver a solution in a vendor agnostic way. Thanks for the heads up. It's the right thing to happen.

Of course there are. Tragedy of the commons. My point is that no single entity is likely to absorb the costs unless they're already enjoying economy of scale advantages and there are business experience/optic benefits to doing so. The poster above you pointed out that Microsoft seems to be addressing this, which makes a lot more sense to me than doing it at the 3d HW vendor level.

Sure, but many people would opt in, especially if you explained that they would benefit.

Maybe. Maybe not. Before committing to developing such a thing, you'd have to at least do some research and analysis to find out if that's true and how the likely opt in/out ratios would impact the business case. Remember, this is hosting content in a daemon on your machine .. I think that'd a non-starter for a lot of people, despite the upside of shorter shader updates. (I'm not super up on what the US ISP market/landscape is like these days, but are not data caps still a thing on many plans there? I get the sense that hosting off a home line is not only a performance concern but a concern with actual possible financial ramifications.)

It can't be only when the game is open - this is when gamers are most sensitive to their computers doing other work, and the available of such a network would be far more limited.

Also a torrent like network would be absolute loaded with cache misses. You need to fetch a shader from somebody who has the exact same hardware/drive/game version combination as you do, and they need to have opted in. I highly suspect the majority case for many would be to cache miss and end up compiling locally.

Asking people to host and serve a non-trivial amount of content to other players is a non-starter. (The size of compiling all the shaders for CoD can range from a couple gigs to 10 gigs.) Opting in to a torrent-like network would have to be opt in - many people would just opt out (justifiably or not) minimizing the point of such a network.

You can probably assume that if you've thought of something, they've thought of it too. They simply have constraints and considerations - both technical and business oriented - you don't need or want to account for.

It's worth noting that many game studios/engines do support shared shader caches in their local studio pipelines, but the hardware config spread is much more limited, and the costs for lost productivity waiting for shaders is far greater than hosting a shader cache on premises.

Yes, this. There are many *many* combinations. Distributed compilation and a remotely hosted shader cache would cost a lot of money to host. I don't think it's the technical considerations that are as preventative as simply the cost of hosting the service.

Particularly for PvP competitive games that require constant FPS (think CoD, Battlefield, Fortnite, etc) runtime shader compilation is a nonstarter. CoD won't even let you matchmake without compiled shaders, even tho the engine supports compiling them on demand.

I once worked at a place that had a clean room process to create code compatible with a proprietary product. Anybody who had ever seen the original code or even loaded the original binary into a debugger was not allowed to write any code at all for the cloned product. The clone writers generally worked only off of the specifications and user documentation.

There were a handful of people who were allowed to debug the original to resolve a few questions about low-level compatibility. The only way they were allowed to communicate with the software writers was through written questions and answers that left a clear paper trail, and the answers had to be as terse as possible (usually just yes or no). Everyone knew that these memos were highly likely to be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

I highly doubt that any AI tech bros have ever been this rigorous, and I'd bet that most of these AIs have been trained on the exact same source code that they are cloning.

"a dummy load"

hey, we found the perfect volounteer

"how to be triggered by the tiniest shit" - welcome to geekmux's TED talk

lol, this place is hilarious sometimes