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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?
On the contrary, I think the CPU will go the way of the coprocessor. The humble Atom may be enough CPU power for most people these days, but you can never have enough GPU power... at least not until your po-- I mean, games, are photorealistic in real time.
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Well... There's 2 ways of looking at it. Either the GPU and the CPU will be merged into one beast, or there will be further segregating of tasks. In terms of price, what's more efficient: Having 1 chip that can do everything (Picture a 128 core CPU, that has different cores optimized for different tasks. So 32 cores optimized for floating point processes, 32 for vector processes and 64 for "generic computing") or having multiple chips that are each fully optimized for their task. Actually, now that I think about it, I'd probably say both. Economy computers would be based off the "Generic" cpu, whereas performance computers and servers would have add-in modules that let you tailor the hardware more towards the task at hand. So the motherboard could get an additional 8 sockets (similar to DIMM sockets) that would let you plug in different modules. So if you need to do graphics heavy processing (video games, movie rendering, etc) you'd add 8 GPU modules to the motherboard. If you needed floating point capacity, you'd add 8 FPU modules... Etc... The advantage of doing it that way over the current PCIe method, is that you get to skip the southbridge (So these modules would have full speed access to system memory, hardware and each other). Of course, there are a lot of hurdles to implementing such a thing...
I am not an engineer, these are just thoughts that rolled off my head...
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And why would they bother with that, when they can simply have a separate computer at home instead of having to worry about dropping theirs and losing everything?
PCs aren't going anywhere, and the idea that they'll be replaced by smartphones is utterly ridiculous. Despite the giant increases in computing abilities, and the ability to fit so much processing power into the palm of your hand, even mainframe computers are still with us; their capabilities have simply increased just like everything else. Why limit yourself to the processing ability that can fit into your hand, if you can have a desktop-size computer instead, in which you can fit far more CPU power and storage? Today's smartphones can do far more than the PCs of the 80s, but we still have PCs; they just do a lot more than they used to.
Of course, someone will probably reply saying we won't need all the capability that a PC-sized system in 20 years will have. That sounds just like the guy in the 60s who said no one would want to have a computer in their home. A PC in 2030 will have the power of a supercomputer today, but by then we'll be doing things with them that we can't imagine right now, and we'll actually have a need for all that power.
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.