Analogies of gpu from cpu evolution

[ant80]

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?

I posted this in the video section, but noone answered until now. Anybody here?

 

[FuriousBroccoli]

We're going to have the capabilities for arbitrarily long general-purpose instruction sets with full precision that allow us to do anything we want, like RenderMan already offers CG artists.

We're almost there, too! The Radeon 9700 and GeForce FX have the full precision, and have more instructions than you can shake a stick at. You can now technically render anything you like on either of these two cards, it's just a matter of speed and passes.

The next generation, the R350-R400 and the NV35-NV40 will allow for full flow control, arbitrarily long instruction sets (well almost, always at least 1024, which covers *almost* everything), and a merging of how we handle pixels and vertices, the two fundamental units that current GPU shaders operate on.

And the generation after that, well I think will mark the beginning of the end. They will be like CPUs now, except massively parallel vector units.

Also, just like CPUs, they are getting so complex that nobody except ATI and NVIDIA will be able to keep up from here on out...