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I haven't fully planned out this future hypothetical yet, but.. How'd I design a computer powerful enough to use for creating videos? Including computer animations?
We'd need some serious datastorage & number crunching in this machine! Ideally fully-programmable, so you can use it as you please.
Ofcourse I'd include a modern GPU which can run the same (small) program over thousands of different datapoints, for top-tier computation. But I'd also want to include a mid-tier...
1/3?
For mid-tier computation I'd (inspired by the PS3) include several microprocessors connected via FIFO channels. By cost-cutting these cores I should be able to fit more in! Besides, FIFO channels are an easier way to manage concurrency!
Include firmware to let you program these.
And for the low-end I'd be tempted to include a Reduceron to coordinate all the other cores. Even if it'd be poorly suited to doing any of the calculation itself, it could be easier to program!
2/3?
For peripherals I'm thinking a trackpad you can draw on, keyboard (transparent upon eink display, so you can programmatically change keycaps), 3-axis joystick, & a drawing tablet. As well ofcourse as a monitor & speakers!
I'm considering allowing peripherals to load sandboxed drivers into the coprocessors to parse its data for the main CPU to process. Though bandwidth concerns...
As for building an OS for this system... Even a minimal one could get tricky...
3/4!
We'd probably need to start by implementing a bytecode editor, whilst programming the GPU to disassemble that bytecode you're editting.
Then we can implement higher-level visual languages, which I'd want to double as the machine's primary UI. And build some useful editors, renderers, etc upon that!
I'd want enough compute to render & compress videos at faster-than-realtime! If we're not doing anything super fancy.
Use USD/AutoMerge as its fileformat.
4/4 Fin! Care to chip ideas in?