HTML5 Accelerator Card

https://twitter.com/_Ninji/status/1317197426449633281

by LeoPanthera • 6 years ago

191 101 6 years ago

twitter.com

ev13• 6 years ago

this is going into some real "blursed image" territory.

dustinls• 6 years ago

I feel like this should be an indication that html is going in the wrong direction.

howlgarnish• 6 years ago

The image is satirical, so yes, that's the point.

I would still love to buy one though.

rsa255192• 6 years ago

I think I'm supposed to hate this, but I think it's great. How is this different (apart from extremity) from adding hardware support for AES?

colejohnson662• 6 years ago

It’d probably be slower transferring the data to it and back than just using the CPU

tshaddox3• 6 years ago

Is that possible? Aren't there hardware video decoders that deliver, well, full video at high frame rates? I'm not sure how those things work. Maybe they have a direct route to the GPU and CPU just decides how things should get composited.

viraptor• 6 years ago

The idea is quite realistic. (Apart from the GCs) But given how html is changing, the behaviour would become obsolete soon.

It could be great though for smaller parts. If someone can make a super fast font renderer accelerator, it could help in general. Alternatively we could adopt the GPU accelerated one created for servo.

ampdepolymerase• 6 years ago

You can update FPGAs over-the-air, the are reconfigurable silicon. You already have this for your CPUs whenever you install an "Intel microcode update".

wmf3• 6 years ago

Just one example https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/maas-isca18-h...

wmf3• 6 years ago

There are a lot of differences. AES will never change and will be recommended for decades. AES is very compute-intensive so a hardware implementation is much more efficient than software.

HTML/CSS/JS is ever-changing, control-intensive, and memory-intensive so it's probably not a good candidate for hardware acceleration.

aaomidi• 6 years ago

So? We have ever-growing standards that we do hardware acceleration on. Some of the newer standards don't get hardware accel until new hardware comes out.

E.g. AV1, HVEC, H264, etc etc. All of these either have or are about to have hardware acceleration. Why not JS?

rektide5• 6 years ago

HTML/CSS/JS is ever-changing,

DOM level 3 core became a recommendation in April 2004. DOM4 went last call in 2015. The fundamentals- I feel- are quite fixed, although many auxiliary systems do change.

https://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core/

control-intensive, and memory-intensive

latency to remote accelerators can be problematic for some control workloads. ideally the control plane can hopefully offload itself onto the accelerator too.

I don't see memory intensive as a barrier. The 8 vdom+ processors probably come with sizable multi-megabyte caches. Perhaps they could be early on-ram processor architectures? after all it seems they have a fixed function diff pipeline. icd also suggest that perhaps the hardware representation might be very effective at using low bit-depth encodings, saving gobs of memory. keep text offboard & encode attribute values via some columnar representation & this could be a high throughput HTMLElement slinger & differ!

userbinator• 6 years ago

...or Java, for that matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

Groxx• 6 years ago

Or Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

chrisstanchak• 6 years ago

Same. Want one.

csande172• 6 years ago

Aside from all the great little jokes--there should definitely be a NIST standard Minion meme collection--the silliest part of this is probably that it's a dedicated PCI-Express card.

Well, that and the idea of permanently burning the, uh, unique design choices made by the web platform into hardware is a little horrifying.

rektide5• 6 years ago

still, few other hypertext models that are worthy of note

barumi5• 6 years ago

How is this different (apart from extremity) from adding hardware support for AES?

For starters, is any part of javascript CPU-bound?

person_of_color2• 6 years ago

Tell me experts, why is this not practical. Can you put a HTML renderer on an FPGA?

ehsankia2• 6 years ago

Don't modern browsers already use GPU acceleration?

person_of_color2• 6 years ago

Do they acceleration DOM parsing, or just media that already has acceleration hooks provided by the OS?

austincheney2• 6 years ago

Because web rendering is already fast and hardware driven. The slowness comes from unnecessary frameworks and bad developers.

For example that card graphic mentions Virtual DOM, which isn’t a technology. It’s bullshit that comes with the React framework.

mhh__• 6 years ago

Getting data to and from the FPGA, and the workload being significantly pointer-chasing based, would probably nullify any advantage an FPGA could have.

jsolson• 6 years ago

Realistically, you'd use the FPGA as your NIC.

saagarjha2• 6 years ago

HTML renderer? Maybe not. But perhaps you could make a FPGA that's good at running whatever bytecode your JavaScript engine lowers scripts to.

mariomariomario• 6 years ago

It's not April 1st but I'm not opposed to this.

ajsnigrutin• 6 years ago

Considering how slow modern webpages have got, especially without adblocks, people would actually buy this.

Devasta• 6 years ago

This would be an appalling thing to happen to the web, so therefore it absolutely will be a real product in the next 5 years.

rektide5• 6 years ago

they're called chrome casts, independent html/browser hardware systems.

you'd need a bunch of those $15 hdmi-in (to usb) adapters to use the chrome casts accelerators but the idea is very much there; hardware that does the web.

RyJones• 6 years ago

The ARM instruction set was expanded to better support JavaScript[0], so why not?

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50966676/why-do-arm-chip...

olliej• 6 years ago

That instruction is super overrated. It has next to no architectural cost - all it does is specify a constant set of rounding and overflow flags instead of using the current fpu state. The only real win is a code size reduction.

JavaScriptCore didn’t even use it when it was first made available because that operation is relatively uncommon and the cost is dominated by the fpu logic that precedes rounding - so it essentially does not matter for real world js. It may be possible to make a micro benchmark that it helps, though I doubt it.

saagarjha2• 6 years ago

I remember when Twitter was having a field day thinking that this instruction was the reason why the newest iPhones benchmarked well. There is no "magic instruction" that gets you a 40% increase in benchmarks. None. It would literally need to be multiple times faster and executed like half the time to get that increase, which is clearly not the case for a JavaScript floating point conversion. It took someone from the JavaScriptCore team replying with "we don't even emit that yet" for people to see sense.

irjustin• 6 years ago

Will this support all the electron apps that have taken over my computer?

FractalParadigm• 6 years ago

I feel like I'm crazy based on how much I loathe electron apps.

Don't get me wrong it's a great concept, I like the idea of portability everywhere, but I can't get past the fact it's basically just a stripped-down Chrome browser with the "app" effectively being plain-ole HTML/CSS/JS. It just seems pointless when you can run the exact software in the web browser you likely already have running, with less overhead to boot.

The music streaming service Tidal really highlighted some of these issues for me, and started my hate-train. Their desktop application is electron-based, which supports HiFi, as does Chrome. The crazy thing is Chrome is the only browser that supports HiFi, and has been this way since the service launched in 2014, despite countless requests from FF users to add support. If Tidal is going to spend 6 years ignoring everything but Chrome for the sake of their electron app, IMO other companies are going to follow suit and continue the march towards Internet Explorer 2.0

buzzerbetrayed• 6 years ago

It just seems pointless when you can run the exact software in the web browser

This isn’t necessarily true though. Electron gives you file system access (among other things). Most electron apps I’ve used at least do something that a browser cannot do. Though definitely not all.

Also, being able to alt/cmd + tab to they application you want is often convenient.

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

I totally understand. Electron is cancer. I don't want a "native app" to come in a 80~150MB executable, bundled with, not only all its dependencies, but a full fucking chrome engine.

Electron is cancer. I hate it and I'm not backing down off that.

throw_m2393392• 6 years ago

It's not so much the tech but yes, having to ship an entire browser for each app... This isn't sustainable, as many cheap devices today are sold with only 64/128 GB SSD...

One alternative is PWA but no interaction with the OS since sandboxed and of course, different platforms == different browsers which more or less support for PWA, so not fit for a Git desktop client for instance.

jayd16• 6 years ago

Check the FAQ for specific electron app support.

piinbinary• 6 years ago

It should also add a few dozen GB of ram for all those chrome tabs.

I can't tell if that card would be a great thing or a terrible thing if it really existed. On the one hand, encoding decisions in hardware might slow down the pace at which the web shifts around. On the other hand, web page complexity would expand to fill the available processing power, so they would only be fast for the web devs and anyone else who has the expansion card.

acomjean• 6 years ago

I saw this and honestly couldn't tell if it was real or not.

I decided no due to the 256MB of Emoji-Cache...

My sarcasm detector is broken...or maybe its just the web..

barumi5• 6 years ago

Didn't Flask started as a bad sarcastic joke gaining momentum and taking up a life of its own?

nyanpasu64• 6 years ago

What was the joke that created Flask?

EDIT: http://mitsuhiko.pocoo.org/flask-pycon-2011.pdf ugh pdf

kbenson• 6 years ago

This is JavaScript adjacent, so I think you can be forgiven for thinking this crazy waste of space might actually be a real thing. I mean, some of the most popular and useful projects in JavaScript started out as such, so there's a long tradition. ;)

rektide5• 6 years ago

I actually sized up the glyph cache & thought 256MB was probably pretty reasonable for high dpi hdr. hopefully it compresses down though!

itiman• 6 years ago

2040: World’s first Electron.JS Silicon, your Slack will never be the same.

Aeolun• 6 years ago

How does this work together with my normal graphics card?

rektide5• 6 years ago

it sends a webrtc stream which your video card's decoders & overlays draw

chaganated2• 6 years ago

It is a joke, yet it is being debated seriously here. This strongly suggests, to me anyway, that our field is becoming a joke.

jdashg• 6 years ago

I work on Firefox and I cannot believe how seriously people are discussing this. At its core, people outrageously under-estimate how complex browsers are. Nevermind "how fast the web is moving", but even Servo cannot reliably render the wide web correctly, so good luck even writing a clean-slate implementation matching a snapshot of web specs taken today!

"It's one browser, Michael. What could it cost? 10 engineers?"

csande172• 6 years ago

The sentiment isn't, "hardware acceleration presents genuine technical advantages for HTML and CSS", it's "the web is so slow and bloated it feels like playing Crysis without a video card."

chaganated2• 6 years ago

Firefox aside, I think anyone who took that joke as a serious product idea needs to brush-up on how computers work, how software works, and wha good engineering looks like.

throw_m2393392• 6 years ago

A great deal of complexity is due to technical debt, notably HTML/CSS technical debt because "don't break the web". Well maybe we should "break the web" once to allow new browser engines to be easier to craft, after all, the web started rather simple 30 years ago...

mattigames• 6 years ago

The thing is, if you can make it run the top 10 websites (google, facebook, youtube et all) and convince the maintainers of those websites to always test on this thing before each release that would already bring a giant win for most users in the planet, and websites that have features outside the scope of this thing would fallback to standard rendering; in such world (and if it gains momentum) developers would slowly move to avoid features that this doesn't support in order to get the performance benefits it brings.

andrewmcwatters2• 6 years ago

Have you actually tried rendering CSS 2.1 yourself? It’s not hard. Writing a tiling compositor is more difficult.

beervirus• 6 years ago

no water cooler

Obviously fake, could not possibly make React tolerable.

sally1620• 6 years ago

This is gotta be a joke. How would you even sell any of these?

perihelions• 6 years ago

This is satire, but parallel HTML rendering has untapped potential for both speedup and power savings (as you distribute single-core workload over a larger number of lower-voltage cores).

https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...

(PDF of a Servo talk from 2014)

I wonder if this could be one of ARM Macbook's killer features: a web browser with a Servo-like parallel engine, written for custom silicon with a number of small-ish, low-frequency ARM cores. Or would that be excessive?

ehsankia2• 6 years ago

Sounds perfect for a Chromebook.

quells2• 6 years ago

Probably not worth it to add dedicated cores for web processing, but iPhone already takes advantage of special ARM instructions for faster JavaScript execution [0]. That will almost certain be used on the new ARM Macs.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18163433

ksec3• 6 years ago

That is not true. As it turns out, Safari didn't use that instruction [1] at the time and even when it did. 99% of those performance gain in Speedometer had nothing to do what that instruction .

[1] https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616?s=...

ilaksh• 6 years ago

Or maybe we could just come up with a way to test and catalog web pages that are actually fast and not bloated. Like a browser extension with a test suite and database or something.

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

Maybe we need a mainstream search engine that would actually put their users’ interests first and heavily penalize websites that are bloated/have ads/autoplay video/etc?

hedora• 6 years ago

I hate to break it to you, but you’re probably using one of these to read this comment.

If you don’t believe me, disable hardware acceleration on your machine (force the video card to VESA or framebuffer mode or something), and try to read the news, use web apps, etc. Compare them to native 2D apps, which should still generally work just fine.

In my experience, a modern, headless 24 core xeon with 128Gb of ram and 2x10GBit nics can’t even use jenkins and jira comfortably at the same time.

News sites with JavaScript enabled and no ad blocker are just not usable at all on such a machine.

Stevvo• 6 years ago

GPU hardware acceleration is not the same as a dedicated accelerator card.

gruez• 6 years ago

I'm not sure whether this is sarcasm or not. This comment (and most other web pages) work fine without any hardware acceleration enabled. Test software: firefox on windows guest os, with 3d acceleration disabled in virtual machine settings. AFAIK browsers in the early 2000s didn't even have gpu acceleration for rendering.

ev13• 6 years ago

This is not sarcasm. I've encountered news sites that do over 15,000 requests and load chains and waterfalls of tracking, invasive garbage, stuff that is illegal in Europe, from over 250+ domains on a single pageview.

lioeters3• 6 years ago

I'm amused, scared, and a little tempted by this vision.

Prior art (kind of): XML Accelerator XA35 - http://soasecure.com/xml-accelerator-xa35/

The XML Accelerator XA35 is a highly efficient XML processing engine that makes use of purpose-built features such as optimized caches and dedicates SSL hardware to process XML at near wire-speed.
The appliance can be used inline in the network topology, not as a coprocessor that hangs off a particular server. A popular use for the appliance is to receive XML responses from servers and transform them into HTML before forwarding the response to the client.

pram• 6 years ago

Wow these are very interesting and amusing. Very nice find!

http://soasecure.com/xml-security-gateway-xs40/

kaszanka• 6 years ago

This just gives me a "Wordfence" 503 for no apparent reason. Here's an archive.org link for the benefit of anyone else who might want to read the product information despite the site owner's arbitrary restrictions: http://web.archive.org/web/20180829042526/http://soasecure.c...

lioeters3• 6 years ago

Thanks! I suppose the site is "secure" by blocking an overly broad set of IP addresses..

The whole thing is kind of "last century", but amusing to know that dedicated hardware exists for XML.

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing such hardware for web view rendering, or JavaScript execution.

torgian2• 6 years ago

Or we could just use html, css and native javascript without using libraries.

Sure it’d make coding harder but the user experience would probably be better.

Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass here.

austincheney2• 6 years ago

Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass here.

Only half so. It’s not that much harder.

torgian2• 6 years ago

The problem I run into sometimes, is when I use only HTML or CSS or native javascript to accomplish something. Someone will always ask "Why aren't you using the <library's code> here?" Answer: "Because it's easier and/or more efficient to accomplish the same thing doing this instead.

I get it, sometimes you want to keep the syntax the same for future maintainability, while other times Ij just want to use something I already know that I know will work just as well.

Ah well.

divbzero• 6 years ago

Awesome. This must be the basis of that “HTML 5 super computer” from Nikola [1]. I’ve been waiting to catch a glimpse of this.

[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-...

lioeters3• 6 years ago

"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said.
"That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."

z3t42• 6 years ago

Thats how almost all news are like. It only sounds stupid because we have a deep understanding of the terms eg. what HTML is.

ksec3• 6 years ago

Junk Free Scrolling.

Apple's Mac Pro, AirPods Pro or iPhone 12's webpages, Facebook Feed, etc etc....

High Quality Image with Animation and Jank Free Scrolling is still not done right ( or not even possible ) by any major tech companies in 2020. And that is just Web Pages, not even Web Apps.

And preferably doing so without my Quad Core MacBook Pro with GPU accelerated Browser ever warming up my lap.

HTML5 Accelerator Card

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