Twilight of the GPU — an Interview With Tim Sweeney

cecom writes to share that Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games and the main brain behind the Unreal engine, recently sat down at NVIDIA's NVISION con to share his thoughts on the rise and (what he says is) the impending fall of the GPU: "...a fall that he maintains will also sound the death knell for graphics APIs like Microsoft's DirectX and the venerable, SGI-authored OpenGL. Game engine writers will, Sweeney explains, be faced with a C compiler, a blank text editor, and a stifling array of possibilities for bending a new generation of general-purpose, data-parallel hardware toward the task of putting pixels on a screen."

Comments

Re:For once ...

[vux984]

No, that can't be it. Know why? Because...why would you put more processing and thus more heat in one place that already has problems with that?

You mean how floating point units used to in a separate coprocessor?
Or how L2 cache used to be on external chips? (And in some cases was even upgradable.)
Or how modems used to have their own signal processors? But now most use the CPU.
Or how we're moving the memory controller into the CPU right now.

Hell, we've even stuck the majority of complete additional CPUs into the the CPU with our modern dual and quad core chips.

Apparently the author doesn't know much about computers.

Apparently you don't know much about computers either.

The entire history of the personal computer is been one long slide of functionality moving towards the CPU. Sure every now and then something new comes along being done by an add-on processor - like the numeric coprocessor for example.

Sure before the coprocessor you could accomplish the functionality of what a coprocessor does with an 'integer cpu', but a hardware optimized numerica coprocessor was a new feature, one that added tremendous floating point performance in dediated hardware. Within a couple CPU generations the coprocessor had been completely absorbed into the CPU.

The author is speculating that the GPU will see the same fate eventually. And he's probably right.

And why install an overkill graphics processing unit inside the processor if most people won't use it anyway?

Once upon a time people said that about numeric coprocessors. "Only a research scientist would need that!"

Re:For once ...

[ZorbaTHut]

Man, you've got some awful, awful arguments here.

Because...why would you put more processing and thus more heat in one place that already has problems with that?

For the same reason that your CPU isn't spread up among thirty chips distributed throughout your laptop: efficiency and cost. Making one chip is generally cheaper than making two, and the amount of bandwidth inside a single chip is massively higher than what you can do with a northbridge.

And why install an overkill graphics processing unit inside the processor if most people won't use it anyway?

Every latest-generation operating system provides a 3d accelerated desktop. Every latest-generation computer provides the hardware to use it. Programs are going to be taking more and more advantage of that feature.

And why attach it to a part that's waaaaaay harder to upgrade and usually either requires a reactivation or reinstalled of your OS?

See question 1.

And how much harder would graphics hardware driver updates be?

Not at all. For one thing, there wouldn't *be* graphics hardware - it'd be more of a vectorized coprocessor. For another thing, why *would* it be any harder? It's not like people are having horrible trouble updating their USB drivers, even if the USB controller is part of another, larger chip.

And would it overheat laptops a hell of a lot faster by putting more heat in one location? (spoiler alert: yes)

Obviously, if they took existing laptop designs, and slapped a bigger heatsource in the CPU, yes. I'm assuming that computer manufacturers aren't functionally retarded, and they wouldn't do that. (Well, maybe some would, but their computers aren't going to be stable anyway.)

And where would the VGA/DVI output go if there's no graphics card?

The same place it already goes on motherboards that have integrated graphics? It's not like "computers without dedicated graphics cards" is a new concept, unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade.

If you put it somewhere else then why move the graphics processor further away from the outputs?

See question 1. Also, "why not?" - it's not like that extra four inches is going to be a serious problem.

As near as I can tell, your argument comes down to the common logical fallacy:

"They *could* do X. But if they do it the *stupidest way possible*, X is a bad idea. Therefore, X is a bad idea."

When determining whether something is a good idea or not, you have to assume it's going to be done well. If the person in charge of integrating CPUs and GPUs is anything less than a complete unalloyed moron, they'll have come up with solutions to all of those issues of yours.