The End of Discrete Video Cards for PCs?
At the Shanghai IDF, an Intel Graphics and Gaming Technologist told TG Daily that "multi-core CPUs will put an end to multi-GPU madness" and that people "probably won't need" discrete cards in the future.
Self-serving on Intel's part? Perhaps. Probably. But I think he's right that if you find even the one discrete GPU in someone's setup, you'll only rarely find someone with the kit for two, and virtually never the means for exotic configurations that support four or eight and beyond. Who needs that kind of trouble anyway? Have you seen the requirements? 1300+ watt power supplies? Cases the size of shipping crates? Running your PC from inside your refrigerator? It's fun to read about or YouTube someone's homebrew supercomputer, but who's got the kind of dough necessary to pull that off? And let's not forget how many games don't work or exhibit a performance increase when you simply throw GPU muscle at the problem.
Eight cores and no discrete GPU = the future of PC gaming?
Game developers worry too much about pushing the over-represented enthusiast-minority-defined envelope and not enough about making interesting games. Take Crysis with its impressive kilometer-sized jungle areas and emergent gameplay that sadly narrowed as the plot unfurled, right down to a single boxy aircraft carrier and a great big gimmicky light show with the denouement's obligatory Contra-style alien that was all pattern-driven spectacle and brain-cell-free. It sure was pur-dy, though, wasn't it?
Maybe if designers spent a little less time trying to get in front of the latest gee-whiz plug-in technology and signing up for intro video brand-awareness marketing plans, we'd enjoy games more as games and less as light shows. Consolidating everything onto a single chip wouldn't entirely fix the problem, but it might help by simplifying and simultaneously narrowing the focus points in the design process.
I know what Nvidia's probably thinking about all this, but how about you? Is PC gaming headed toward single-chip, multi-core, all-in-one processing, or will we still have discrete multi-GPU setups in the next 5 to 10?
Replay
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AMD has already announced that they're planning on adding ATI cores onto future chips, alongside the standard CPU cores.
CPU != GPU. I do agree that as the number of cores increases as well as the number of transistors in the processor, there will be less of a need for an ultra powerful graphics card, but I still believe the GPU will have an important place in computing.
Look at the cell processor for instance, it still contains a graphics processing component because there are different optimization streams for each architecture (latency vs. throughput). GPUs are vastly superior at specialized operations (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000732.html). If anything, I am more excited at the prospect of a GPGPU than a 16-core CPU.
Maybe a GPU could replace a CPU? Doesn't the F@H team say that they can get processing power from an ATI Radeon 1900 GPU equivalent to 2 dozen Pentium fours? Or at least, the same PPD.
@nmanguy
It's a possibility, but not one you are likely to see in the near future. GPUs are highly parallel stream processors, which is very good for the limited work that GPUs are asked to perform presently, but it has its limitations. An integrated solution like the cell processor is a much more elegant design scenario.
I don't think the GPU will ever be fully replaced, just less necessary as CPUs get into quintuplets of cores. But CPUs can't pull of the special graphics/shading/AA work as well if at all as GPUs can. Every system, at least now, has to have both because one just can't replace another.