I wish I didn’t know developers who would look at this and go “What’s the joke? Sounds like a good idea.”
Guilty.
95 percent of the people using computers are just using them for a browser.
Let’s implement the DOM in hardware!
Nothing quite like locking yourself further into a broken, patched together frankenmess forever based only on momentum.
Hey!
Seems to be working for the current generation of AI primitives used…
And that’s supposed to convince me it’s a good idea?
Let’s implement a web without DOM-abused-as-GUI.
Please yes, for god’s sake. 🙏🙏🙏🙏
Wait… what?
It does sound like a good idea tbh
I know this is a joke - but there totally is hardware acceleration for some of this stuff in modern processors. There definitely is for JS, JSON and generally string stuff. It’s not even x86 only, ARM got these kinds of things as well (although likely less of it)
I’ve always wondered about string handling - it’s so common, and seemed to be an afterthought in every processor I ever learned about their instructions. Of course, I last touched assembly language 30 years ago, so… I would hope there’s been some progress since then.
What’s amazing is that actually everything in there could be doable unironically.
But more amazing (and embarrasing) is the fact that we have reached to this point where optimization is that undervalued by most programmers. Horrible timeline to live in, when AI is messing up with hardware prices.
Hardware acceleration for an interpreted programming language? Can you point me to a specific example or clarify what you mean, because I find that hard to believe.
I’m not sure what they were going for, but I know that modern browsers do just in time compilation for regularly repeated code parts to allow much faster execution, so “interpreted programming language” may be a little of a blurry definition. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Just_In_Time_Compilation
I couldn’t find any info on any hardware specific to JS/JSON for clients but I’m no expert, maybe they will provide more info.
Tbf, it’s not really like processors have ‘DO JS STUFF’ instructions, they are not made for one language or data format specifically of course. But ultimately, instructions are shaped by things people use.
JSON for example requires searching strings for structural characters:
,,{,}etc. Iirc you can use VPSHUFB (‘Packed Shuffle Bytes’ or so, AVX >=2) to map 32 bytes (or 64 on AVX-512 I guess) to any structural character in one instruction. That’s quite the speedup compared to comparing all of them to all special characters one at a time, even considering SIMD kinda moves on its own pace. And it’s exactly the kind of stuff you would use in your JS engine to make parsing JSON crazy fast, even when it’s plain text, which is obviously less than ideal for a computer.I remember there was some instruction that was introduced specifically because of something JS does all the time tought. I forgot what it was, maybe someone else can help out.
js isn’t really interpreted anymore, it’s all jit-compiled. instructions that help with common compiler operations are pretty standard.
but there have been cpu features for interactive languages for a long time. lispmachines and forth systems are the obvious ones, but there’s been a push towards software-specific cpu dev even in the mainstream. UltraSPARC could run java natively, and itanium was designed with object-oriented systems in mind.
I’ve been browsing with jit disabled for years now. No regrets.
I absolutely lost it at “dual garbage collectors”
Needs 2x 10GbE ports to download bloated React apps directly into its onboard cache. Otherwise perfect.
I want that thing to never do a captcha again, please
With catptchas becoming more and more common as sites try to stop AI crawlers, I suspect that’s going to become a real thing…
A real thing that irrevocably identifies you online, with absolutely no anonymity, and costs $9.95 per month, and only works on Cloudfare captchas.
Actually an iPhone is a bit more than $9.95 a month https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph4f43a30c9/ios
The day is getting close, as long as the site uses rePrompt and you sign in to Google, on a Google browser, on a Google certified Android device with proprietary Google services. Otherwise maximum intruptions for you.
Ok but how bad does it get when the 256MB emoji cache is full? Cause that’s not enough space for all my emoji.
I love the idea that somebody at NIST is in charge of collating a Standard Minions Meme Collection.
You know it would be some suburban moms.
Damn do you need 64gb of sweet DDR5 to run this
No, it requires at least 256 GB of unified memory to run its AI.
Instructions clear. 8x32GB DDR5 purchased. Now what?
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Want 256gb to run Chrome lol
As someone who loves expansion slots and hates how GPUs and SSDs keep taking them away, I’d legit want one of these if they were real. Hell, I’m still mourning the death of the physics card.
(Edit: No I didn’t mean PhysX. They were a brand at one point, not the tech. PhysX invented the physics card, and were the only ones to produce them because nVidia bought out the tech before it could be mass produced.)
Imaging putting a “grep card” into your computer and suddenly grep is ten times faster
cargo install ripgrep
regex accelerator, with direct communication to your disk drives!
Would be good for regex Doom.
Oh man, the only time I have ever seen a PhysX card mentioned in the wild was back then on my fathers XP machine in Crazy Machines 2. And I wanted that sucker so badly. Never laid my hands on one though. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t even know what they look like…
PhysX?
Yes, PhysX was the first company to produce physics cards. (And the only one because nVidia bought the tech and integrated it into their GPUs before it even had a chance to hit the ground running.)
Just install another ram bank of 64gb, that’ll do
This quantum leap could be just the breakthrough Firefox needed to set event coordinates during HTML 5 mouse drag events.
It’s gonna need lots of RAM and then cost a fortune…
Don’t worry we offer financing options at very fair rates which also include a discount for the first year of the mandatory ad-supported subscription required to use the card.
