Comment by andrewcooke
17 years ago
gpu/cpu unification has to happen some time in the next 10 years (in the 2010 thread i argue against it being next year, but it's inevitable at some point). the next amd architecture is a step in that direction.
edit: also, please, please, ultralight laptops with e-ink screens.
edit2: to clarify the above, cpus are currently tending towards more cores, while gpus are tending towards larger caches. both are trying to extend their area of application into tasks performed by the other, in the hope of more speed over a wider range of applications.
Think that will lead to real-time high performance ray-tracing in applications and games? Because that seems to me like the next logical step for the marriage. It's a problem domain where programmers are already struggling and it lends itself well to highly-parallel processing.
i'm not sure what it will lead to, to be honest. my best guess is that there's some new kind of interface (3d?) that will exploit the extra power.
Why would they unify? They are doing very different jobs (serial versus vector processing).
Because there are two converging trends at the moment:
CPU makers getting in to the GPU arena:
AMD bought ATI, intel has announced a CPU/GPU combo
NVidia is going in the direction of more and more general computation capability with their offerings (see the gt 300).
Sooner or later those trends will meet somewhere in the middle.
I predict this will happen as soon as NVIDIA offers a product that has enough general compute capability to run a linux port.
It will become a general co-processor, integrated on the low end, separate on the high end, never unified. The two types of chip fundamentally don't do the same job. They can't run each other's programs.
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