Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all (Linux User)

Posted Mar 7, 2012 14:04 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all (Linux User) by khim
Parent article: Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all (Linux User)

I wonder... typically your PC is idle waiting for a keystroke. When it does have to compute something this is either pretty simple, or something computationally intensive like encryption or video decoding which runs well on a GPU. The most CPU-intensive, branch-heavy thing in day-to-day use is probably rendering complex HTML pages.

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Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all (Linux User)

Posted Mar 7, 2012 16:01 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

The most CPU-intensive, branch-heavy thing in day-to-day use is probably rendering complex HTML pages.

This is kind of obvious: since there are whole OSes which do everything as “complex HTML pages” (webOS, ChromeOS, B2G, etc) literally any task can be covered by that definition. But even “simple”, “easy” things are in reality quite computationally heavy. Think True-Type rendering: basically unavoidable in contemporary OS and truly ubiquitous, yet very branch-heavy and power-hungry. Sure, you can employ some caching and make it more-or-less bearable, but from power supply POV all such things are kind of useless: significantly more energy-effective way is to add some kind of traditional CPU core.

Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all (Linux User)

Posted Mar 7, 2012 17:25 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Truetype rendering is CPU-intensive but not unmanageable. I remember using outline fonts on an Archimedes with 8MHz ARM processor. They were rendered into bitmaps (with sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hinting) as needed; it took a fraction of a second per glyph after which the bitmap was cached for future use.

You are right, though, that it is much more power-efficient to have a traditional CPU core do these things rather than force a big lump of GPU silicon to do tasks it's not well suited for. I was thinking only of making the cheapest hardware possible for something like the Raspberry Pi, which doesn't run from batteries.

(By HTML I meant rendering only, not Javascript execution; these days with reasonably quick Javascript engines even most web applications spend most of their time idling the CPU, waiting for the next keystroke.)