[Arm-netbook] Mali at fosdem

[Henrik Nordström]

fre 2012-02-10 klockan 23:03 +0000 skrev lkcl luke:

>  btw although i understood what you said about shaders being "mini
> ALUs/CPUs", gordan, i still don't grok what they're actually _for_.

The explanation on Wikipedia seems to make sense to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaders
and what else interesting is linked from there.

> what the hell are the damn things doing? :)

No firm idea other than that each is doing some small fragment of the
computation needed for rendering a 3D scene. I would think the
operations are in many ways similar to SIMD and data flows, and very
little focus on logics and program flow.

I did have a dream of getting into advanced 3D graphics when I grew up
some many years ago (around 1990 or so), but eventually got stuck in C
land instead doing networking and other less visible low level stuff.
Still have several text books on the subject but never found the time or
need to actually get into it.

Regards
Henrik