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?

Comments

Re:The GPU will go the way of the coprocessor

[Lord Ender]

The GPU will go the way of the coprocessor

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.

Re:The GPU will go the way of the coprocessor

[ircmaxell]

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...