Analogies of GPU evolution from CPU evolution

ant80

Senior member
Dec 4, 2001
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Earlier cpu's were fixed things. They could only do one thing. Nothing else. Later on, they became programmable, improved programmability etc. etc. Now that we know how cpu's turned out, what can we say gpu's will turn out to be in the future? This evolution is going to be faster than cpu's, because we have cpu's to compare with, but what do u think is gonna happen from now on?
 

xXgambitXx

Senior member
Mar 26, 2002
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i remember an old thread about how GPU's will be obsolete in a couple of years.

the reasoning behind it was that CPU's will be so powerful that it will run everything.
 

ant80

Senior member
Dec 4, 2001
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Somehow I doubt that is ever going to happen. We will never get the same quality from a cpu that we get from a dedicated gpu.
 

Slappy00

Golden Member
Jun 17, 2002
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i remember an old thread about how GPU's will be obsolete in a couple of years.

I think it would be hard to impliment such a radical change. There are quite a few companies that depend on Video Cards for income. I think that video cards have an entirely different existance from CPUs in that CPUs are not programable for specific graphical functions (vetex shaders and the like). Its this flexibility and ease of use for programmers (as opposed to having write code to do rendering in software) that will keep video cards around and evolving at a much faster rate than CPUs. In fact I would dare to say that GPUs will be comparitively more powerful than CPUs in a few years if they maintain their current rate of evolution.
 

BFG10K

Lifer
Aug 14, 2000
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i remember an old thread about how GPU's will be obsolete in a couple of years. the reasoning behind it was that CPU's will be so powerful that it will run everything.
Unlikely. Specialised dedicated hardware (GPU) is always going to be faster than generic hardware (CPU). Also there's also the issue of memory bandwidth, of which GPUs have many times the amount that CPUs do.
 

BD2003

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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Yeah, whoever said that is a crackpot. No matter what, dedicated hardware will ALWAYS be faster than running everything in software.