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AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA Over the Next 10 Years
GhostX9 writes "Alan Dang from Tom's Hardware has just written a speculative op-ed on the future of AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA in the next decade. They talk about the strengths of AMD's combined GPU and CPU teams, Intel's experience with VLIW architectures, and NVIDIA's software lead in the GPU computing world." What do you think it will take to stay on top over the next ten years? Or, will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else out of business?
I predict wrong predictions.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
The GPU will go the way of the coprocessor
With greater personal power, we won't have Microsoft dictating what 3D features we can have. With individuals become supercomputers, these three companies will be out of business. However, personal survivability and power will be sufficient that former employees will be fine.
What?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
All three will be marginalized by the ARM onslaught. Within 10 years, smartphone will be the personal computing device, AMD and Intel processors will power the cloud.
In short: make your time.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The use of futurism has been thoroughly discredited.
It seems like VLIW is a bit like nuclear fusion -- in ten years, people will still be talking about how its practical realization is ten years away.
Let's look at x86. It's dominant because of mostly inertia. Millions of chips must be taken into account when deciding whether to try a new architecture. A personal supercomputer--a self modifying brain--will not have limitations on trying new things.
Or look at directX--this is a cooperative library for ensuring games can work with Windows. Personal supercomputers will be able to establish higher level descriptions when interacting with other supercomputers (posthumans). Without burned-in chips or IP (intellectual property will seems silly in this era), it's about the stories you can tell.
There's a new GPU company called Zig? Where?!
You can always spot a sensationalist post when part of it predicts or asks who will go out of business. Or what thing will disappear.
For example, in his post, ScuttleMonkey asks this:
NNote, the post is a good one - Im not being critical. But change in the tech industry rarely result in big companies going out of business - if they do, it takes a long time. I think sun is the canonical example here. It took a long time for them to die - even after many, many missteps. Sun faded away not because of competition or some gaming changing technology, but simply because they made bad (or some would say awful) decisions. Same for Transmeta.
People have been predicting the death of this or that forever. As you might imaging, my favorite one is predicting Microsofts death. Thats being going on for a long, long time. The last I checked, we are still quite healthy.
Personally, I dont see Intel, AMD, or NVIDIA ding any time soon. Note, AMD came close this last year, but they have had several near death experiences over the years. (I worked there for several years...).
Intel, AMD and NVIDIA fundamental business is turning sand into money. This was a famous quote by Jerry Sanders the found of AMD. Im paraphrasing, but it was long the idea at AMD that it didnt matter what came out of the fabs as long as the fabs were busy. Even though AMD and NVIDIA no longer own fabs, this is still their business model (more or less).
I think its interesting how a couple of posters have talked about ARM - remember, AMD and NVIDIA can jump on the ARM bandwagon at any time. Intel already is an ARM licensee. Like AMD, they are in the business of turning sand into money - they can and will change their manufacturing mix to maintain profitability.
I also dont see the GPU going away either. GPUs are freakishly good at what they do. By good - I mean better than anything else. Intel flubbed it badly with Larabee. A general purpose core simply isnt going to do what very carefully designed silicon can do. This has been proven time and time again.
Domain specific silicon will always be cheaper, better performing and more power efficient in most areas than a general purpose gizmo. Note, this doesnt mean I dislike general purpose gizmos (like processors) - I believe that the best system designs have a mix of both - suited to the purpose at hand.
-Foredecker
Jibe!
Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed
Unless those big dogs wake up soon from their stupor, an unknown startup will sneak behind them and steal their pot of gold.
Rebel Science News
move zig move!
move zig move!
Take off, eh.
The article is about the GPU business, which, IMO, is the less interesting aspects of these companies. The new hotness is all in the mobile space. You want interesting, read about the upcoming Cortex-A9-based battle going on for 'superphones', smartbooks and tablets.
People have been predicting the death of the desktop computer for a long time, but the problem is that there hasn't been anything realistic to replace it. We're within sight of that replacement. Once everyone has a superphone that can do the bulk of what people normally do (either when in mobile mode, or when docked to a nice monitor/keyboard/mouse at home/work), THEN (and only then) will the desktop PC fade away for the majority of people's home use.
I give it 2 years before this is practical, though of course, the ecosystem to support such a change is the hard part. Can you get access to all your data, etc., from your docked mobile? That's gonna be the key. What about when you want to take a call at home and use your docked mobile as a computer?
You want to make money - solve these problems now.
Actually, usually it's nVidia or ATI dictating what 3D features we have, with the other immediately implementing the same thing to keep up.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Batteries limit mobile devices. Heat limits supercomputer servers.
The first low power CPUs like the Atom were lame. Better devices on the way.
http://javadong.blogspot.com/2010/03/ftl-not-faster-than-light.html
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
When singularity come, electronics end up all over.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Consoles come out with 1080p/DX11-class graphics. Graphics cards for the PC try to offer 2560x1600+ and whatnot but the returns are extremely diminishing and many current PC games will come to a console with keyboard and mouse. GPGPU remains a small niche for supercomputers and won't carry the cost without mass market gaming cards. The volume is increasingly laptops with CPU+GPU in one package and there'll be Intel CPUs with Intel GPUs using an Intel chipset on Intel motherboards - and they'll be a serious player in the SSD market too. AMD will do the same but suffer from being behind on manufacturing process and continue to struggle but survive like Macs do in a Windows market. nVidia will lose their way if they haven't already lost it, everything they've said so far about Fermi makes me think they're heading down a dead-end street. No i7/i5 motherboards with nVidia chips, new Atoms which kill ION, nVidia is being forced to go discrete in a market that is increasingly more integrated. The good new for them is that Intel will continue to flop on 3D performance including Larrabee so there'll be a market for discrete cards a little longer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The (I assume automatically targeted) ads were awful. They had one for an add-on sound card on the second page of the article, "The Death of the Sound Card". Lovely pictures and remembrances of old stuff though; I still remember my first 3dfx Voodoo, and sending the daughter-card back for a Monster when I found out the frame rate in GLQuake was weak sauce. Good times.
(1) Low power consumption that avoids the use of a traditional clock. (2) Stack machine architecture - produces dense code. (3) Multiple stacks with shared hardware and compiler support.
Mobile phones don't have the shelf life required to replace the desktop. I like having my PC at home simply because it cannot easily break like a phone can. I don't worry about getting hit in the holster with a door from a careless worker and shattering my touchscreen on my home PC, and I don't worry about someone crushing it when they carelessly sit on a table that my PC rests on. Everyone I know with a smart phone replaces it every couple of years - but I have desktops that last 5 years before I move it to a test bench position or give it to a nephew as an upgrade for him ( even then, I only replace it for gaming purposes and not due to any hardware failures).
At some point, the GPU goes on the CPU chip, and gets faster as a result.
Maybe.
GPUs need enormous bandwidth to memory, and can usefully use several different types of memory with separate data paths. The frame buffer, texture memory, geometry memory, and program memory are all being accessed by different parts of the GPU. Making all that traffic go through the CPU's path to memory, which is already the bottleneck with current CPUs, doesn't help performance.
A single chip solution improves CPU to GPU bandwidth, but that's not usually the worst bottleneck.
What actually determines the solution turns out to be issues like how many pins you can effectively have on a chip.
I am still waiting for OpenCL to get traction. All this CUDA and StreamSDK stuff is tied to a particular company's hardware. I think there is a need for a free software implementation of OpenCL with different backends (NVidia-GPU, AMD-GPU, x86-CPU). Software developers will have great difficulties to support GPUs as long as there is no hardware-independent standard.
Both CPU and GPU Are Doomed
Why was I downvoted as flamebait? Who did I flamebait? Are some moderators on Slashdot working for Intel, AMD or Nvidia?
Rebel Science News
Mobile phones don't have the shelf life required to replace the desktop.
This would be part of that ecosystem mention I made.
If you dock your mobile phone to access the 'big' data (videos, music, etc.), and other stuff is in the cloud, then replacing the phone itself isn't going to be a big deal, and with cell providers going the hwole 'go with us for 2 years and get your phone for half price' thing, that will incentivize people to upgrade their shit more often, which, from a web developer's perspective, I find quite nice. :)
There's a new GPU company called Zig? Where?!
That's a good question. Main screen turn on.
Move zig!
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
True, but cloud computing has a serious obstacle to overcome in this area - the ISP. Every ISP is working on a way to charge per gig per month right now (I know, I work for one that actually has been doing it in the central US for over 3 years). ISPs are one of the greatest threats to tech like this simply because they want to find a way to make more money off providing the same service which is slowly choking the customer out of wanting to use the internet.
A patent dies everytime you mentaly masterbate on slashdot. Oh the horror.
will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else out of business?
Unlikely.
After all, any newcomer would have to buy licenses for all those patents owned by the existing companies. That's a lot of money, and it isn't even spent for realizing the newcomer's innovative and great idea. That requires another big load of money. Good luck finding enough investors for your business.
I am not really here right now.
ATI will need to step up it's Linux driver development. It appears that certain flavours of Linux have been scrubbed from the list they are willing to support (namely Fedora).
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1696
Nvidia, on the other hand, is doing well with providing 3D drivers across the board. Users have the option of using either the proprietary drives from Nvidia or the new open source Nouveau drivers in the kernel.
That any processor company that is able to find a technology to significantly boost the performance of a single-core processor will wipe the floor with competitors who are still relying on the multi-core performance kludge.
From the nvidia page:
Yay, finally OpenGL has put the last nail in the coffin of Directwhateverit'scalled.
That's why your comment was downvoted as flamebait. They don't like your comment, so they shut you out. Censorship from the big dogs, that's all.
What I find interesting is the overall lack of game-changing progress when it comes to non-3d-or-hd-video-related tasks. In March 2000, i.e. ten years ago, top of the line CPU would be a Pentium III coppermine, potentially topping out around 1 Ghz. I could put Windows XP on one of those (with enough RAM) and do most office / browsing tasks about as fast as I could with today's top of the line CPU. Heck, it would probably handle Win7 okay. Contrast the period 2000-2010 with the period 1990-2000. In 1990 you would be looking at a 25mhz 486DX.
Only if it's cubed.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
...which has a full-sized keyboard, a mouse and a huge display? I bet you call it 'a computer' or 'PC'. Because editing documents, watching videos, even web surfing on a 5 inch display with a micro keyboard sucks.
in 2012 a huge solar flair will hit the earth disabling all electronic equipment, sending the world into a Mad Max like landscape where we battle for fuel to run some bad ass looking off road monsters. Intel, Amd, Nvidia will be the names of our grand children's children. ;-P
Meet my boy Athalon XP, he is much smarter then your Intel boy, but sort of a hot head
I just wish that AMD will finish its open-source drivers and ditch the infamous proprietary ATi legacy. Than Nvidia will have no other choice than to open their drivers or go bankrupt. I know, I am a dreamer.
Now you just sound educated stupid.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Desktops will always be much more powerful than phones, and there will always be ways for the "bulk of people" to utilize that extra power.
Why on Earth won't the future be like now in this sense - mobile small computers (smart phones, netbooks, tablet pcs) that you can lose or break reasonably easily. Bulkier boxes sitting at home, that never go anywhere (not exactly a huge drain on the space inside people's home...where's the push to plug a tiny phone into your huge monitor)?
And in the middle laptops.
And why won't there be some "cloud" computing and some decidedly non-cloud computing? Do people in the future lose all concept of redundancy?
If anything, I expect a more heterogeneous range of computing devices/methods in the future, not less.
Azural - instrumentals
the ecosystem to support such a change is the hard part. Can you get access to all your data, etc., from your docked mobile? That's gonna be the key.
And it's going to be why it doesn't happen for a LOOOOONG time. In the US, Wireless gives you a choice of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile. Wired gives you choice of your phone company or cable company. None beat having your data local, and as long as you're keeping a machine around with your data on it, why not pay ~$50 more so it can drive your keyboard, video, and monitor without plugging in your mobile?
Phone as a Terminal
The best solution would not be to run apps on the phone at all. It would be to get always on bandwidth from a PC at home to your phone that was fast enough to do remote desktop at a speed where you couldn't tell that you were working remotely. Once we have that kind of bandwidth, the phones are basically done. The phone as a terminal. With this configuration, you get:
* Massive upgradeability on the phone since to make your phone faster, you just upgrade the PC in your home.
* Far greater battery life, as once the phone is a good terminal, adding more processing power to the PC will add power, but since that part is plugged into the wall, it won't drain your battery at all.
* Losing your phone does not effect any of your data.
* Replacing your phone is simpler.
* You can access the same application from a desktop, TV, or the phone, and there is no reason the interface cannot change for each.
* Better utilization of processing power, since people will end up with a home server anyway, for running their home media servers, security systems, home automation, etc...
* Cheaper. It will always be more expensive to build these things smaller, so putting it in a PC makes it cheaper.
* Faster to market. It takes time to shrink electronics.
* Possible functionality that is impossible on the phone. We are getting to the point where we may be limited by physics on how small transistor can become. This means that the amount of processing power that would be supplied to the phone as a terminal may be impossible to have in a handheld device.
atom is too lacking in cpu features to take over like that and low end amd chips are much better and they have a good low end video plan.
ATi needs to die. Their drivers suck. Windows/Linux, its irrelevant, there's always problems.
NVidia rocks! Intel are great cards if you do not play many high spec requiring games (basic laptop/corporate/work system).
Word.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
With greater personal power, we won't have Microsoft dictating what 3D features we can have. With individuals become supercomputers, these three companies will be out of business. However, personal survivability and power will be sufficient that former employees will be fine.
What?
...strawberry fields forever...
It boils down to the ascendence/dominance/supremacy of the financial sector. Finance ubber alles. Companies had nothing new to offer so they borrowed money (billions in some cases) to buy out their competitors. When the mergers failed to result in the massively greater efficiencies, they started selling off divisions and the shareholders got screwed. (What good did buying Saab do GM, for instance?) None of this mattered to the finance guys. They got paid on the front end. I need to get Paul Krugman's book. Damn, it's expensive.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I have only one thing to say about NVIDIA: nvlddmkm. That says it all. I won't ever buy NVIDIA again.
My opinion is the best bang-for-the-buck would be to integrate RAM into the CPU. Perhaps a decent GPU with lightweight CPU added in would make sense if netbook continues as a separate niche, but again it might be better to put the RAM in as well. Between allowing multiple memory paths (no longer restricted by pins on the chip as much) and presumably lower power required to access the bits, it seems like a reasonable path to take. Imagine if the RAM were fast enough that little cache were needed on the CPU for added benefit.
pimtamf
I think any hardware company can survive until either their products become a part of another system (e.g. Sound Cards) OR seriously fail to compete against another product (not a good e.g., but MIPS architecture... which lost to x86 in desktop sector).
I am confident all three players (INTL, AMD, NVDA) will survive this decade with the exceptions:
1. AMD financially collapse
2. INTL builds a competing CPU+GPU product, which will cut lose NVDA
After all, in the PC targeted semi-con industry, there are not many players but still.. its a growing market!
I seriously doubt NVDA can win a x86 processor battle against INTL... unless they acquire AMD. Which will be an interesting tech-fight we can tune in. But still, AMD is a toxic asset with all the debts and mismanagement in later half of naughties.
Obviously, I want to see a CPU+GPU product. It can be a real game changer in this decade considering the upcoming trends like e-readers, powerful netbooks, smart phones so on.
Clearly, hardware companies are lucky compared to software counterparts. As in, software market can change overnight and that's it. If Intel was a pure software company and did a mistake like Netburst, they will be niche within months. And Microsoft.. they survived vista debacle plainly because of market share.. but if they continued until 2011-2012.. they would've been doomed and apple would've easily take over OS market.
I hope that the opposite will happen, i.e. the CPU will go onto the GPU.
Let me explain: code is much smaller in size than data. It makes sense not to move data from memory to the CPU, but move code from CPU to memory! a big step in processing speed will come if each memory chip is also a CPU with a separate buffer for code. Instead of copying data, code will be copied to each memory chip's code cache and then applied over the local data.
This will considerably increase performance, as well as provide the basis for safe concurrency, since the data processed by a memory chip can't be processed by another chip.
I'm not sure why you think this is a property of the ecosystem. The handheld that I use is a Nokia 770. It's five years old, still works fine, and is now quite out-of-date. My laptop is a bit over three years old and will probably be replaced some time this year. Desktops? I've got a few of them in the attic somewhere.
The handheld has no moving parts, so it's a lot less fragile than the laptop. I've dropped it a few times without any problems. The CPU is around 200MHz, and I'll probably replace it soon with something in the 600MHz-1GHz window and a decent OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU. At that point, it goes to my mother to use connected to her stereo for listening to Internet radio stations and checking online TV guides and will probably see several more years of use. Not bad for a machine that cost around £70 when I got it in 2005... The laptop that I bought a year earlier cost almost £2,000 and saw three years of use before being replaced.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I pondered the feasibility of a stack machine revival about a year ago. Stack machines lost over register machines because out-of-order execution of stack-based instruction sets is really hard. Very low power chips, however, tend not to have out-of-order execution (although the Cortex A9) does. If you discard OOO and, for the same transistor count, can get two stack-based cores and enough i-cache to keep them fed or one register-based core and enough i-cache to keep it fed, then it's a clear win for the stack machine.
It's not clear, however, whether this would be the case. ARM's Thumb-2 instruction set is incredibly dense and you'd have to design a stack machine very carefully to make it denser. Register machines are easier to optimise code for than stack machines.
Stack machines also don't really play nicely with pipelining. You generally have to wait for one instruction to complete before you can start the next one. Register machines can start one instruction then if the other one has independent operands you can start the next one next cycle. You could address this by having a lot of SMT, so you overlapped instructions from different threads in the pipeline, and every individual thread would execute one instruction and wait for it to complete.
It might be an interesting architecture for running highly-parallel Java server code on, but it wouldn't be particularly good for the majority of existing code.
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