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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."
and it sucks hard. takes too much time.
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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? And why install an overkill graphics processing unit inside the processor if most people won't use it anyway? And why attach it to a part that's waaaaaay harder to upgrade and usually either requires a reactivation or reinstalled of your OS? And how much harder would graphics hardware driver updates be? And would it overheat laptops a hell of a lot faster by putting more heat in one location? (spoiler alert: yes) And where would the VGA/DVI output go if there's no graphics card? If you put it somewhere else then why move the graphics processor further away from the outputs? These are all questions that pretty much make his ridiculous idea incorrect. Apparently the author doesn't know much about computers.
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... ago, the man is a moron and out of touch. Now don't take that the wrong way because he's said stupid shit like this before.
He thought that GPU's would become totally integrated into the CPU 10 years ago and it was only "a few years away".
The man is missing the big piece of the puzzle: Memory bandwidth. Without memory bandwidth those amazing graphics are not possible. PC main memory cannot even begin to approach the bandwidth of a dedicated solution. Sometimes I wonder if programmers like these need a lesson about hardware design.