The Future of graphics cards?

[KryNx]

Recently we have been seeing dual-core CPUs hailed as the future, due to the fact that it is getting harder to increase the CPU speeds due to power consumption and thermal constraints. However, it is also seeming that GPUs are beginning to push the same boundaries - 70 degrees is seen as a common temperature for a modern graphics card, top end cards need more power than an AGP slot can provide, and require additional molex connectors, sometimes even multiple molex connectors.. therefore, it seems likely that graphics cards will begin going the same way - we have SLI being reintroduced by nVidia, and while there have been unsuccessful attempts in the past, Gigabyte recently successfully released a dual gpu graphics card.. do you see multi-core gpus and/or multi-gpu cards as a likely avenue for future graphics cards to go down? Please explain your answer, and detail what pros and cons you see.

 

[Calin]

The GPU processing is much more friendly to parallel processing (using multiple pipes) than the CPU processing. So, the graphic card bussiness will be able to increase rendering speed using either lots and lots of pipelines, or having a reference design for a graphics unit multiplied (multicore would not be a necessity in the near future)

 

[Mingon]

Essentially they aready are, look at the 6600/x700 and the 6800/x8xx the latter have twice the die capability of the former due to quads i.e 6800 = 4 quads 6600 is 2 quads and 6200 is 1

 

[seanp789]

Personally i think SLI is a bit mess.

That gigabyte card the 3D1 is 2 separate cards on the same board. with 2 full separate sets of RAM. I also think 2 full gpus is a bit redundant in many ways. Why not just make twice the pipelines or shader units into one chip?

GPU's are not quite like cpus dual core. GPU's are already parrallel in nature and the designs change pretty dramatically every year or so.