pouët.net

uh, the war between intel and nvidia seems to reach a new step : nvidia declares the CPU dead.

i dunno the truthfulness of such a piece of news, but intel is obviously planning the death of GPU...

anyway this is a new(?) religion war to dispute ad nauseam!

GPU? CPU? who cares, when scene is dead...

Wether the CPU "dies", or the GPU "dies", then the result is going to be the same - both functionalities unified in a chip.
AMD/ATI could make such a system much easelier than their competitors, since they have both technologies inhouse. Imagine how much it would simplify laptop production - it could even revolutionize the market.

I forsee transportation's death as soon as teleportation rises !

and the memory chip makers won!

I await the resurgence of the PPU!

FPU will win.

i vote STFU.

This comes into mind.... and of course EPH wins ;)

Hmm.. Zest you shouldn't take all that shit too seriously.. it's mainly a war of words between the 2 companies going on now, so don't bother, just take the popcorn and enjoy the show :-) ..

I don't think either the CPU or the GPU will die... But wait and see.

Those NV guys speak to the gamers and GAMERZ SUCKZ.
Go get the CPU out of your computer and then go figure.

So, to summarise:

CPU dies -> We get awesome graphics, but can't do anything with them because there's no CPU to do any work. Businesses watch demos instead of spreadsheets?

GPU dies -> Everything goes back to text mode and dos.

exactly my thought.

dudes, ever heard of the term "marketing"?

What?

I foresee the death of silicon, and welcome our new 12-core FPGA-overlords clocked at 3GHz. It can be a CPU, GPU, FPU, RTU (raytracing unit, or whatever), all of these, or even something no one has ever heard of before. Anything u have imagination to shuffle the logic-gate arrays to. Perhaps even hardware that can reprogram itself, and optimize itself on hw-level.

But then... fuck fpga's, and bring in the bio-processors... then forget that, and welcome quantum computing.... Bah, everything can always be done better.

Just get back to your Amiga and be happy ;-)

lol, just read that ikea stuff... make it 1024-core fpga's... ;)

graphene, ftw!

The BPU (BASS processing unit)! ;)

uhum... unless I see a running Windows Vista on their newest Geforce I doubt that CPUs will die any time soon...

Is this a trick question?

It is possible that current GPU design could evolve to do more general purpose computing, to the point that we no longer need a separate CPU -- but then this GPU descendant would be a CPU by definition.

If processing became very distributed at every level, then you could argue that CPU's no longer exist -- but again, there would still be a CPU on at least a conceptual level.

Where CPU development evolves to do more graphics processing (this already began, going at least as far back as MMX and possibly quite a lot further), then things become more interesting. There is then the possibility that processing for graphics is not removed from general purpose processing to an extent that it would be descriptive to refer to anything as a distinct GPU. So it is at least possible in theory that there will be systems without GPU's. And not surprisingly, there are and have been many computers that don't have a distinct GPU.

Anyway, I think it's a little silly to think of one piece of current tech dying and and/or another piece of current tech winning. There is more evolution that that in technology. If you're an investor though, then you may be more interested in who will gain and who will lose.. but those are companies and people rather than tech.

My understanding of what's going on is that we're using more cores and fitting more things into a chip. It turns out that graphics processing is programmable and has branches, registers and such. It's sufficiently similar to a CPU that if you're going to put a bunch of cores on a chip, you may begin to wonder why you bother making them different at all. This is happening on consoles already. So this is disruptive to CPU and GPU companies and they have to rethink what they are doing. In the meantime, they want investors to think they're the way to go. Along the way, someone says their competitors' tech is dead, the competitors rightly defend themselves (because they're actually working towards the same things) with equally misleading rhetoric, and it gets ugly. If Intel's research and development is too heavily influenced by the same simplistic marketing that they're using to mislead people, then I'd like to think that they'll get hurt by it. If nVidia's is influenced by their marketing, it might not be such an issue since that would be pushing them in a similar direction anyway.

Correct this if I'm wrong or missed something.. it is pretty interesting what's happening.

Wild guess? Yes.

I'm starting to get worried for nvidia. See, investing in the demoscene, making events such as nvision, weird statements in the media.. acting strange. Lack of presence in the cheapo integrated gfx market..

(Also general wonkyness of their drivers lately)