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NVIDIA Predicts 570x GPU Performance Boost
Gianna Borgnine writes "NVIDIA is predicting that GPU performance is going to increase a whopping 570-fold in the next six years. According to TG Daily, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the prediction at this year's Hot Chips symposium. Huang claimed that while the performance of GPU silicon is heading for a monumental increase in the next six years — making it 570 times faster than the products available today — CPU technology will find itself lagging behind, increasing to a mere 3 times current performance levels. 'Huang also discussed a number of "real-world" GPU applications, including energy exploration, interactive ray tracing and CGI simulations.'"
Or... not.
Currently CPUs and GPUs are stamped together. Basically, they take a bunch of pre-made blocks of transistors(millions of blocks, billions of transistors in a GPU), and etch those into the silicon, and out comes a working GPU.
It's easy - relatively speaking - and doesn't require a huge amount of redesign between generations. When you get a certain combination working, you improve (shrink) your nanometre process and add more blocks.
However, compiler technology has advanced a lot recently, and with the vast amounts of processing power now available, it should be simpler getting more complex blocks fully utilized. A vastly more complex block, with interconnects to many other blocks, could perform better at a swath of different tasks. This is evident when comparing the performance hit from Anti-Aliasing. Previously even 2xAA had a huge performance hit, but nVidia altered their designs, and now Multisampling AA is basically free.
I recall seeing an article about a new kind of shadowing that was going to be used in DX11 games. The card used for the review got almost 200fps at high settings - with AA enabled that dropped to about 60fps, and with the new shadowing enabled, it dropped to about 20fps. It appears the hardware needs a redesign to be more optimized for whatever algorithm it uses!
Two other factors you're forgetting...
1) 3D CPU/GPU designs are coming slowly, where the transistors aren't just on a 2D plane... that would allow vastly denser CPUs and GPUs. If a processor had minimal leakage, and low power consumption, 500x more transistors wouldn't be a stretch.
2) Performance claims are merely claims. Intel claims a quad-core gives 4x more performance, but in many cases it's slower than a faster dual-core.
570x faster for every game? Doubtful. 570x faster at the most advanced rendering techniques being designed today, with AA and other memory-bandwidth hammering features ramped to the max? Might be accurate. A high end GPU from 6 years ago probably won't get 1fps on a modern game, so this estimate might even be low.
A claim of 250x the framerate in Crysis, with everything ramped to the absolute maximum, might be even accurate.
But general performance claims are almost never true.