Uhhh... forgeting bobcat much?
Is it out yet? Are there any sales for bobcat/ontario/bulldozer to gauge that they sold well? When AMD delivers, when we see the prices, when we see the performance and when sales show for it, then we can revisit.
For example, Llano is already rumored to be
delayed until Q3 2011. Intel will have even faster processors/APUs by then. Similarly, both AMD and NV will have even faster graphics cards by 2011. There is so much hype for APUs, it's not even funny. I haven't seen this much hype for any product I can think of. All Intel and AMD did was take advantage of the more advanced manufacturing process to integrated the GPU into the CPU. The end result is taking a horrible GPU from the chipset and integrating it into the GPU, concurrently increasing its performance to mediocre (which would have happened on the chipset anyways due to advances in engineering and technology) - and suddenly everyone and their grandmother is touting the
end of the discrete GPU (and esp. from NV as if AMD is immune and will continue selling $50-600 GPUs).
The way I see it is we had slow chipset graphics + CPU and now we will have slightly slow graphics inside the CPU. Nothing has really changed except increased performance.
I don't understand the hype behind APUs. In other words, if chipset graphics increased their performance 2x every 12 months, would we still say that discrete graphics is dead?? Of course not. People are forgetting next year discrete graphics will increase performance again, where a 400 SPs HD5000 core will be nothing special when constrained by lack of memory bandwidth.
My personal view is this:
The
real reasons discrete GPUs are on the ropes are due to these factors:
1) Consoles are taking over and less and less people are gaming on the desktop, instead choosing to use PS2/PS3/360/Wii.
2) Other portable devices satisfy the cravings for occassional gamers such as the Ipad, Smartphones, handhelds like Nintendo DSi. With people's busy lives, they might be satisfied to play a 30 min of simple and fun 2D/3D games on the go.
3) PC gaming sales are down this year, and with constant consoles ports in the last 3-4 years, there are hardly any killer PC games you can't play on a console other than say Crysis, WOW and Starcraft 2. Sure the graphics are better on PC, but most people don't care about that - not enough to spend $200+ on a graphics card when a console is only $200-300 that they don't have to upgrade for 6-7 years. Bottom line is, desktop PC gaming is more expensive and it doesn't have enough game exclusives to justify upgrades every 2-3 years for the
majority of consumers.
4) For most games today the only difference between a $200-600 graphics card is amount of AA and ability to play at 2560x1600 - that's it. There is no way you could have played most games maxed out at 1920x1080 on a $200 graphics card 4-5 years ago. Today a $200 GTX460 1GB will do so without breaking a sweat. Clearly hardware advancements have vastly outpaced software advances in the last 3-4 years in PC gaming.
5) Job and economic uncertainties have contributed to consumers' relucantcy to buy luxury items (i.e., graphics cards). It is no wonder the <$200 market of graphics gets about 75% of all the sales volume for discrete chips.
6) Most consumers now purchase laptops/netbooks over desktops where discrete graphics is largely an afterthought for their needs.
If we look at sales of discrete graphics, they were shrunk almost 40-50%
way before the APU was even in the picture because of these 6 factors above. How come all these "discrete GPU" bashing comments/articles never mentioned the true reasons for the decline of the discrete GPU that has been happening for a long time now?
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