The Six Thousand Dollar GPU

First things first: an apology. After three-plus years and 73 episodes without missing a drop, we finally missed one. Turns out even the Beer Driven Devs need a break sometimes.

Refreshed and back at the mics, Matt goes full tech historian this week. While researching a long-form essay for his blog, he went down a rabbit hole on the history of CPUs and GPUs, and came back with a story that runs from the Amiga’s dedicated graphics chips all the way to today’s AI-fuelled GPU gold rush.

We cover:

• The Amiga era — why it was ahead of its time, and the myth about what actually killed it (spoiler: Doom used integer maths)
• How Doom put PC gaming on the map, and how Quake’s floating-point demands buried Cyrix
• CISC vs RISC, Acorn, the BBC Micro, and how a British education computer company gave us the ARM architecture inside Apple Silicon
• The chaotic birth of 3D consoles: the 32X, the Jaguar, the Saturn, and how a failed Nintendo partnership became the PlayStation
• The graphics card wars — Matrox, 3dfx, PowerVR — and how DirectX and OpenGL abstractions ended them
• What shaders actually are, why your games say “compiling shaders”, and how programmable GPUs accidentally gave us crypto, scientific computing, and AI
• Today’s market: $6,000 RTX 5090s, CUDA vs ROCm, why VRAM matters for AI, and Intel Arc quietly becoming the value king
• The disappearing mid-market, consumers voting with their wallets, and retro gaming’s moment
• The challengers emerging to fill the vacuum: Jim Keller’s Tenstorrent and Bolt Graphics
• Nvidia’s real play for the next decade — and why their throne isn’t as secure as it looks

The through-line of the whole story: constraints drive innovation, and the current kings can be dethroned. They always have been before.

🍻 Tonight’s Drinks: Matt – Oakvale Shiraz 🍷 (back to an old favourite) Liam – Mountain Culture Status Quo Pale Ale 🍺

🔗 Tonight’s Links:

• Where AI Goes Next (Matt’s long-form essay)
• Cyrix: Gone But Not Forgotten (TechSpot)
• Gamers Nexus interviews Bolt Graphics founder Darwesh Singh
• Tenstorrent
• Bolt Graphics

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Cheers! 🍻