Note that RISCV vector extension also supports matrices, tensors, etc. So at least for GPGPU compute applications, it feels quite modern (e.g. Volta has tensor cores).
Also, Larrabee had fixed-width 512-bit wide vectors (it did not support SSE 128-bit wide or AVX 256-bit wide vectors). RISC-V has Cray vectors of dynamic length (e.g. need a 128-bit vector, no problem, need a 4096 bit one? no problem either).
I think the main issue for programming CPUs to solve GPU problems is that our programming models for CPUs don't expose the memory hierarchy, while the ones for GPUs do that in a much more finer grained way.
>> Graphics is much more subtle than just vector instructions as can be seen from the failures of Larrabee.
It is. But given there are zero other open source solutions, I think LLVM Pipe running on the vector extension would be a decent option. It's not going to compete with the big guys, but it will make SoCs possible without licensing grahpics IP.
Yes. But the RISC-V Vector instruction will serve as the baseline. And further extensions will add register types, Esperanto is already extending them with graphic types.
