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

YAY! More Prognostication!

[newdsfornerds]

I predict wrong predictions.

Re:YAY! More Prognostication!

[lorenlal]

I think it's because they're being paid to.

Re:YAY! More Prognostication!

[kiwirob]

I predict they are seriously mistaken in forgetting about ARM processors in their analysis. ARM processors have taken over pretty much all the mobile and a lot of the netbook space. From wikipedia As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor ARM Wikipedia The world is getting more and more mobile and the desktop processing capacity is becoming irrelevant.

I believe Moore's Law stating the number of transistors will double on an integrated circuit every two years and the continual increase of CPU GPU processing power is a solution looking for a problem. What we need is power efficient processors that have enough processing capacity to do what we need and nothing more. Unless you are a Gamer or doing some serious GPGPU calculations in CUDA or OpenCL what on earth is the need to have a graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GT 340 with around 380 GFLOPs of floating point processing. It's ridiculous.

Re:YAY! More Prognostication!

[PopeRatzo]

I predict wrong predictions.

Not only wrong predictions, but predictions based on a completely faulty notion.

From the summary:

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?

Do you get that? It's no longer enough for a company to innovate, to produce a quality product, and to make a profit. They have to be "on top". They have to kill the competition, to put everyone else out of business. Welcome to Capitalism, 2010.

This might be why some people see this era as being the end-game of "free-market" capitalism. Because now the only way to produce is to destroy. Because it's not enough to succeed, but others have to fail. What good is being rich unless there are poor people to which you can compare your success? After all, if everyone's standard of living goes up, who's going to clean my fucking house?

There was a time, in my lifetime (and I'm not that old) when a company, let's say an electronics manufacturing company, could sell some stock and use the proceeds to fund the building of a new plant, the purchase of new equipment, the hiring of new employees. The family that owns the company sees their success in terms of this growing and profitable concern. A "healthy" profit on investment for such a company could be as little as 8 percent (and this was a time when you could get 5 percent for a savings account). The people who work for this company like it so much, have done so well as employees, that entire extended families go to work for the company, generation after generation. I watched this entire cycle occur right here in my home town to a company that made industrial lighting (like the kind you'd see at a major league ballpark during a night game). Now, the company is gone. Swallowed by a company that was swallowed by a company that was swallowed by a foreign company that lost contracts to a company in Europe. There's a trail of human loss all along the way.

The theory of markets and business that sees the killing off of companies as a preferred outcome will always end up badly.

Re:The Singularity?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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?

ARM

[buruonbrails]

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.

Re:ARM

[h4rr4r]

So you could get an arm laptop or x86 workstation. For work use thinclients will be popular again soon and many people will use a smart-phone, hooked to their tv for display when at home, instead of a home computer.

Then the cycle will restart. Welcome to the wheel of computing.

Re:ARM

[Angst Badger]

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.

ARM may well come to dominate personal computing, but it sure won't be via the smartphone. No one is going to edit long word processor documents on their phone, much less edit spreadsheets, write code, or do much else that qualifies as actual work. And it's not because they don't already -- in many cases -- have enough processor power; it's because they don't have full-sized keyboards and monitors. I'll grant that it's possible that phones or PDAs of the future might well attach to full-featured I/O devices, but by themselves, no.

The cloud, too, has some significant limits that it will be difficult if not actually impossible to overcome. Security is a major issue, arguably theoretically resolvable, but trusting your critical data to an outside company to whom you are, at best, a large customer is not.

Re:ARM

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:The Singularity?

[binarylarry]

In short: make your time.

Re:Haven't you heard? Studies have shown..

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of futurism has been thoroughly discredited.

I predicted that years ago.

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...

Too much hyperbole...

[Foredecker]

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:

...Or, will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else out of business?

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

At some point, the GPU goes on the CPU chip

[Animats]

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.

what's interesting to me...

[buddyglass]

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.

Re:what's interesting to me...

[Kjella]

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.

It's wetware-limited, doesn't matter how much hardware or software you throw at it. We can spend two minutes reading a page then expect the computer to render a new one in 0.2 seconds, in practice it will never go faster. I don't know why it's become such a myth that we'll always find new uses for computing power. A few specialized tasks now and then perhaps, but in general? No, people will chat and email and listen to music and do utterly non-intensive thing that go from taking 10% to 1% to 0.1% to 0.01% of your CPU.

Contrast the period 2000-2010 with the period 1990-2000. In 1990 you would be looking at a 25mhz 486DX.

Yes, computers are starting to return to the normal world from Moore's bizarro-universe where unbounded exponential growth is possible. After decades of conditioning you become oblivious to how crazy it is to expect something double as fast for half the price every 18 months (or whichever bastardization you choose to use). Rventually a ten year old computer will be like a ten year old car, sure they've polished the design a little but it's basically the same. And that is normal, it's we that live in abnormal times where computers have improved by several orders of magnitude.

Re:The GPU will go the way of the coprocessor

[TikiTDO]

Your post is based on several assumptions that make no sense to me as a student of human nature, and an engineer.

1. 1080p is current technology. Even if we assume we will not have hologram visual output within the near future, there will still be some new technology that the powers that be will sell to the masses. It may be an incremental improvement, but it will still be enough to drive the markets.
1a. As long as it's new and shiny, there will always be someone to buy it.
2. Consoles use GPUs and CPUs the same as PCs do. There is a longer update cycle in place, but whenever each cycle ticks they adopt all the new technology that has been developed during the lifetime of a console. As such, it makes sense for the console makers to encourage such development.
3. Intel would have to shut down all of their operations to let nVidia claim the workstation market. Like it or not, Intel still makes pretty hefty CPUs, owns the workstation market, and has more disposable cash, and a bigger engineering staff than any other chip maker. The embedded market has even more competition for its crown, so I will not go there. The supercomputer market, while good for satisfying the nerd bragging rights quota, is not know for being an amazing source of profit.
4. The AMD vs Intel battle for the mid-range market is actually something I can see coming to pass. I would not be too surprised if this market gets a third player as the line between computation devices becomes blurred.
5. ARM is not the only company in the world that can make a low power chips. Worst case, ARM has a few years of dominance before the other guys catch up. Also, as the article pointed out, integrated CPU/GPU has several obvious advantages over discrete CPU + discrete GPU.

In all, while I am not ready to make my own predictions, yours could use a bit more analysis and tweaking.