Hmm, the other day I was talking about exactly this with a coworker. This being that transistor cost is not getting exactly cheaper when you factor in R&D and complicate the manufacturing process.
I think Intel will be able to bundle a "good enough for playing AAA games in 1080p with maxed out graphics" video processor into the main CPU in about one/two years, maybe less. Those CPUs will be more expensive that the tinier (in transistor count) ones. This will happen around when they hit 14nm. NVIDIA will go out of bussiness or become a niche company dedicated to vector processing for scientific computation or heavy workstations, and maybe a small player in the ARM market with their Tegra architecture. Maybe AMD will go the same road, making something similar to Intel but using their ATI technology.
Bonus 1: too bad, no more Singularity mumbo-jumbo in less than two years.
Bonus 2: I am one of the few that believes ARM will never be relevant in the desktop/laptop/console/gaming segment, because of what I think Intel will come up with.
I don't buy it. The transistor counts of modern GPUs far exceeds that of even multi-core CPUs. It's not rational to say "oh, well, that's all just trivial engineering, it'll go away". Especially as GPU performance continues to be taxed to a far higher degree than the CPU typically is. Modern popular AAA PC games like Battlefield 3 or Starcraft 2 will eat all of the GPU you throw at it and then some.
Intel control the whole platform now that they have PCH, which enable them to put the GPU in the CPU. With Ivy Bridge you even have OpenCL support. There is nothing stopping Intel from embedding a proper GPU now that they don't have to fit it in the northbridge. The only reason NVIDIA is still in business is because embedded graphics sucked too much.
Hmmm, you are right... maybe I shouldn't have said "maxed out" but "mostly acceptable". I think that "maxed out" will be a niche market, specially since the computers able to really max out games are already niche, and PCs in general are loosing market share. I'm not implying its a trivial engineering problem, just a problem Intel will be able to solve in one/two years and deliver processors for a small box you plug into your TV and happily game without investing money and real estate space into a PC.
I should have mentioned, that chart is for sales in 2011. Some of that is low graphics gaming, but people aren't spending $18.6 billion on bejeweled (maybe on Farmville though). If you take just the segment of the market that is "high-end graphics gaming" then it's still a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Why would a self-sustaining industry of that size just spontaneously go away?
No, I too also believe ARM has a huge hill to climb to matter any where else. Radical energy prices could affect that, but I've had SPARCs, MIPS, Itaniums, PowerPCs, and Alphas and Intel always wins, performance per dollar per ease of being on main street. (Trust me, there is geek appeal to some exotic RISC chip but after supporting it for a while, there is something very cool about just apt or yum installing the stuff you want and it works) Intel is insanely good at what they do.
It is fascinating seeing the split between design and fabrication come out like it has. As Sun faded out, I thought they were at a huge disadvantage without fabrication capability, it really looked like the only way to compete and matter was to do it all. That could ultimately end up being Intel's disadvantage if some of the fab companies can out do them at fab costs; but like I said, Intel is insanely good at what they do.
It's also remarkable that NVidia does look like the odd man out. Seemed unbeatable for so many years there
Why do you think everything will stop with 1080p? Next stop will be 1920x1200, then 2560x1600.
And I don't know a lot about hardware, but my GTX460 can't max out games even at 1080p and it's pulling 150 watts. If you packed all of that hardware and 1GB of video memory onto a CPU it would melt.
I don't know why you think a non-16:9 size will be the next one, specially since there is already a widespread 4k standard (3996:2160, almost 16:9ish), and is almost irrelevant in adoption outside specific niches like digital cinema, or some countries like japan.
I think 1080p is here to stay, at least for three/four years. TV manufacturers seem to be focused more on things like 3D than in increasing resolution. I don't blame them, 1080p for movies had very slow acceptance, and 1080p is already pretty much indistinguishable from 4k when viewed more than 3/4 meters away or when projected in less than 60 inches of diagonal size.
> Why are televisions interesting? PS3 and Xbox graphics are so many years behind PC now...
They can catch up as fabbing processes catch up into consoles, or some sort of gaming set top box that works more like a PC. I believe its sort of a common assumption PCs are going niche.
> Have you seen one of the new iPad screens? It's hard to believe that that kind of DPI on computer monitors isn't going to have huge adoption.
I haven't. I'm sort of into photography (see profile) and would like to in order to see some of my photos displayed on that much DPI on an iPad held at about 20/30cm from my face. That resolution should really help get more depth effect in full screen photos, and maybe some day we'll no longer need to print them in order to fully appreciate them. I know I'll drool in awe when I see one, it did happen with the iPhone 4 :P
But... remeber resolution is all about distance, because as you put things further away pixels seem smaller. According to Apple "retina display" is 57 arcseconds, that's (I believe) an iPad 3 at 30cm. WARNING: I didn't find an easy calculator for these numbers, please someone correct me if I'm wrong: A 46 inch 1080p TV at 2.5m should present you with smaller pixels than that, around 45 arcseconds. A 27 inch computer monitor with 2560x1440, like the iMac display or the Dell U2711, at 60cm has a pixel size of around 75 arcseconds. So we are almost there for the best displays, and definitely already there for big TVs, taking into account average viewing distance. Since I imagine graphic intensive gaming will take place mostly on TVs using something more like a console than a PC, I don't see a bright future for NVIDIA, but I do see most gaming taking place in Intel SOCs.
Also, for completion of my numbers, a 23 inch 1080p monitor at 60cm should be more in the 85 arcseconds territory... so maybe there is still some leeway for graphic cards, but they'll definitely hit a roadblock soon.
I recently built a new low-end computer with one of the AMD APU's in it, because it seems 'good enough' for that type of machine. However, it still doesn't perform as well as discrete parts. For about $80 you can buy a low-end video card better than anything integrated at the moment.
AMD has a full line of high-performance video chipsets to pull tech from, but they still just barely get to 'adequate' for low-end useage with the cpu/graphics combo. I don't see where intel is going to leapfrog everyone else in this area, unless they buy NVidia (which would probably be blocked).
i believe the exact opposite thing.
[1] is a meticulous story about Intels larrabee screwup. nvidia and ati are already defacto for high end gaming and graphics - intel is going to find that hard to beat, short of an acquisition.
windows 8 will be arm optmized, which means that intel is genuinely worried. nvidia's tegra is already being used for servers ... and of course, people are buying many more tablets than laptops.
ps3 graphics capable handsets will be out in 2013, so intel is truly looking for ways to stay relevant in an ipad world.
> so intel is truly looking for ways to stay relevant in an ipad world.
They can stay relevant in gaming. When/if PCs fade out and we go back to a big servers/workstation/thin client world Intel will be able to live in the three of them. They are already doing well in big servers and workstations, and I think they are the only ones currently in a position to be the dominant provider of technology for the "gaming thin client", whatever it will look like... I don't know if it will be more like a console, or more of a small PC you plug into your TV. NVIDIA only has something to offer for the workstation type of PC.
why do you say that ? Intel has nothing like Tegra (Clover Trail is not shipping yet) - which is already a GPU + CPU hybrid SOC. You dont need a separate CPU. Windows 8 is already running on Tegra 3 - http://www.anandtech.com/show/5614/microsoft-shows-windows-8...
Plus, the big big reason is that there is already a ton of content out there from big publishers that is Tegra optimized.
Tegra has been very successful in the thin client/ipad world and is looking to screw with Intel's server world with Project Denver.
I'm not even talking about nvidia's next gen Kepler graphics card released this week with serious power optimizations - Intel is seriously far away from that world.
In short, intel has 0 in graphics capabilities - while nvidia has 0.75 in cpu capabilities.
We won't know whether Larrabee was a screw-up until we see how successful Knight's Corner is. A lot of groups are currently running prototypes under NDA. It's a programming model debate as much as anything, the hardware capability is available in both models.
It was an epic screw-up to position it as a head-to-head competitor with NVIDIA and ATI for Direct3d. They should have positioned it as an HPC chip from the beginning and then perhaps later said: "Oh, btw, it has these texture samplers, so let's make a video driver just to see how this CPU of ours compares to GPUs for gaming." That would have set expectations at a much more realistic level.
What about Intel's mobile presence? Because they don't have much of one, and small devices are only going to continue to proliferate in the near future. It's a bold claim that "NVIDIA will go out of business" because Intel can produce integrated CPU/graphics offerings that are good enough on consumer laptops and desktops today and that will continue to get better, but that doesn't at all imply that Intel can just throw money at improving power efficiency to beat ARM or Tegra at their own game. Unless you know something we don't :P
This is so short sighted it's almost laughable. "640K ought to be enough for anybody!", right? You think graphics are somehow to flatten off in the near future? Far from it, we are going to continue to see exponential growth in graphics horsepower and developers leveraging that power in games and rendering.
I meant good enough in "good enough when compared to what a dedicated card can offer for the same price", not "the absolutely unbeatable graphics".
If transistor price doesn't decline for discrete graphic card manufacturers, there will be no more transistors in your GPU ever again, unless you pay a hefty premium for the transistor count difference. This is what NVIDIA is complaining about in the article. They will have to compete with Intel's bundled graphics card, and not only in the lower segments of the market but also the mid and high/mid segment.
But if people are willing to pay $1-2K for a gaming rig (and given that games are $100-200 plus a monthly subscription they probably will) then the proportion of that cost which is GPU will increase for a few years.
The question is whether in the 'post-PC era' it would be worth the games companies putting out games which will play on a $500 home PC with an embedded intel GPU - even if that GPU is as good as todays GT295. Between high end gamers, family console gamers and casual mobile gamers is there any profit in good-enough?
I think Intel will be able to bundle a "good enough for playing AAA games in 1080p with maxed out graphics" video processor into the main CPU in about one/two years, maybe less. Those CPUs will be more expensive that the tinier (in transistor count) ones. This will happen around when they hit 14nm. NVIDIA will go out of bussiness or become a niche company dedicated to vector processing for scientific computation or heavy workstations, and maybe a small player in the ARM market with their Tegra architecture. Maybe AMD will go the same road, making something similar to Intel but using their ATI technology.
Bonus 1: too bad, no more Singularity mumbo-jumbo in less than two years.
Bonus 2: I am one of the few that believes ARM will never be relevant in the desktop/laptop/console/gaming segment, because of what I think Intel will come up with.