Why Doesn’t Hardware Do Geometry?
Too much extra hardware & software:
- Special-purpose specially-programmed FP chips
- “Triangle bus” resynchronization to maintain order
- Can become a “decelerator” with the next CPU
Alpha CPU is good enough for Neon
- Easy to design object setup headroom into Neon chip
- So faster CPUs mean faster performance in future
- SMP systems with parallel software may go even faster