AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA Over the Next 10 Years

GhostX9 writes "Alan Dang from Tom's Hardware has just written a speculative op-ed on the future of AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA in the next decade. They talk about the strengths of AMD's combined GPU and CPU teams, Intel's experience with VLIW architectures, and NVIDIA's software lead in the GPU computing world." What do you think it will take to stay on top over the next ten years? Or, will we have a newcomer that usurps the throne and puts everyone else out of business?

Re:YAY! More Prognostication!

[kiwirob]

I predict they are seriously mistaken in forgetting about ARM processors in their analysis. ARM processors have taken over pretty much all the mobile and a lot of the netbook space. From wikipedia As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor ARM Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] The world is getting more and more mobile and the desktop processing capacity is becoming irrelevant.

I believe Moore's Law stating the number of transistors will double on an integrated circuit every two years and the continual increase of CPU GPU processing power is a solution looking for a problem. What we need is power efficient processors that have enough processing capacity to do what we need and nothing more. Unless you are a Gamer or doing some serious GPGPU calculations in CUDA or OpenCL what on earth is the need to have a graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GT 340 with around 380 GFLOPs of floating point processing. It's ridiculous.

At some point, the GPU goes on the CPU chip

[Animats]

At some point, the GPU goes on the CPU chip, and gets faster as a result.

Maybe.

GPUs need enormous bandwidth to memory, and can usefully use several different types of memory with separate data paths. The frame buffer, texture memory, geometry memory, and program memory are all being accessed by different parts of the GPU. Making all that traffic go through the CPU's path to memory, which is already the bottleneck with current CPUs, doesn't help performance.

A single chip solution improves CPU to GPU bandwidth, but that's not usually the worst bottleneck.

What actually determines the solution turns out to be issues like how many pins you can effectively have on a chip.

Re:YAY! More Prognostication!

[Entropy98]

Your right, besides video games, servers, scientific research [stanford.edu], movies, increased productivity, and probably a dozen things I haven't thought of what do we need more processing power for?

Of course efficiency is good. Computers have been becoming more efficient since day one.

There is a place for tiny, low power ARM chips and 150 watt 8 core server chips.

Re:YAY! More Prognostication!

[Blakey Rat]

I predict they are seriously mistaken in forgetting about ARM processors in their analysis. ARM processors have taken over pretty much all the mobile and a lot of the netbook space.

Mobile I'll give you, but netbook?

When's the last time you saw a ARM netbook? If you've ever seen one? Sure, you read articles on Slashdot saying that they'll be here Any Day Now! But they aren't. I think there was one model in Fry's for a short while-- that's about it. Unless you count the numerous vaporware-spouting websites.

And, frankly, Atom has such a lead in the netbook space now, it's basically done as far as ARM is considered. They've wasted too much time, assuming anybody was even working on this mythical product to start with. At this point, an ARM-powered netbook would *really* have to blow the competition away for people to even take a second look. It's not happening.