[update]too many links on blog, quote was from senior project manager not head scientist[END]
Watch him be proven wrong.
Answer: There are advantages but there are also many disadvantages to such an approach. CPU and GPUs have different design cycles, and the challenges of integrating both on a single IC are nontrivial. This perhaps explains why AMD/ATI is taking so long to get their Fusion products to market. Moreover, a CPU/GPU die will never be able to offer equivalent performance of a dedicated CPU coupled with a dedicated GPU.
We’ll see about that. At the rate chips are shrinking and stacking, we may have no choice. Ten years ago I had maybe 32 megs of ram on my video card, now I’ve got a gig and it takes up about the same amount of space. Both Intel and Nvidia don’t have what AMD has – that underdog desperation that makes one do crazy, bold things. Many people have famously claimed nevers on the computer industry, and so far they’ve been surprised every time. 640k was once enough, now 6 gigs is barely scraping by.
Honestly, at the rate technology is crankin along, I’ll have a GPU in each eye by the time I’m 80. Or, more likely, that sort of technology will be deprecated in favor of whatever our next step is going to be (just wait until we don’t need near absolute Zero temperatures to quantum-compute).
One thing I do know. Whatever sort of processing my eyeballs do, it will be GOOD.
Tags: i, wild speculation, yes please i'd like it now, yes this is really how I amuse myself