3. the ceo of the company that makes unreal engine predicted the whole lifecycle of GPUs more then 10 years ago, and he is accurate within a year. His prediction on the matter for the next 10 years are fascinating, sound like they would be right, and seem to indicate something similar. IIRC I think he stated that the next verison of unreal engine would use CPU and GPGPU rather then direct X.
I just think he phrased it all wrong.
The way he said it, it was as if GPU technology would disappear altogether, and CPUs as we know them today would just become fast enough to replace them.
That's like saying that FPUs disappeared when Intel launched the 486.
It didn't disappear, it just got integrated with the rest of the CPU. But to this day, we have dedicated FPU units in our CPUs.
With GPUs the only thing that disappears is the fixed-function hardware. At every new generation, more and more functionality becomes programmable. Larrabee would be the endpoint of that trend, with no fixed-function hardware at all, except for basic texture filtering (which you could also view as a special case of caching/prefetching).
But the Larrabee was also remarkably similar to the G80 architecture, with very wide SIMD units processing scalar threads in parallel on a large scale.
That is typical GPU technology, as no regular x86 CPU ever had SIMD processing anywhere near that wide. And for a lot of applications it would be absolutely no use anyway, and the standard CPU/FPU units are still very much required to keep the performance up.
So it's more of a synergy of the technologies. Neither really disappears.
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