The AMD/ATI "why?" emerges

[Dr Mordrid]

3 guesses and the first 2 don't count

[Wombat]

If it were that obvious, I'd know.

[Elie]

Hehe, while everyone is buying graphic companies, my prediction is that Intel will buy Matrox

[Dr Mordrid]

That could actually make sense. The P-cards have 4 programmable shaders & Matrox would be cheaper to buy than NVIDIA. Never say never these days

[Wombat]

But Intel's already done integrated graphics. They're probably more up-to-date on the technology than Matrox is.

[Elie]

Intel doesn't have a strong 3D chip!

Their graphics chip leaves much to be desired, I would prefer Matrox over anything Intel

[Jammrock]

Intel doesn't have a strong 3D chip!

Their graphics chip leaves much to be desired, I would prefer Matrox over anything Intel

Intel's next IGP is supposed to be pretty good. At least on par with the ATi and nVidia IGP offerings if the hype can be believed.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2837

[Dr Mordrid]

But the question is are they actively pursuing GPGPU? I would imagine at some level, but akin to what AMD/ATI are planning? Hmm.....

Dr. Mordrid

[Wombat]

Personally, I can't even stomach the term "GPGPU." It's not at all general purpose. That's what CPUs are.

But I think this sort of thing comes pretty naturally now that PCI-E is about. AGP offered almost no return bandwidth, with high latency, and that's why the effort was so crippled until recently.

[VJ]

But it wouldn't be a very good idea to do so. CPUs are mostly general-purpose machines. Video cards are very specialized. It just so happens that video card architecture is highly compatible with certain software problems, such as massive parallel calculations. Their functional units and memory systems are pretty favorable for these things.

Well, inside a CPU are different, specialized units (floating point, integer, ...) to increase performance. Adding additional specialized units would increase perfomance, as long as there is sufficiant work for them.

However, putting that functionality on a CPU would be a negative, overall. You can't put something on a CPU without taking something away.

I'm actually thinking along the lines of a dual-core, with 1 traditional CPU and 1 GPU-like thing. Or a quadcore for that matter...


Jörg

[Nowhere]

I wonder how open the AMD/ATI platform will be in regard to Linux though (remembering how great are ATI drivers there)

[Dr Mordrid]

N/P with Linux DD's here so far, and the software is what'll be using the GPGPU. As long as the DD's are set up right it should work, and you can bet AMD will be overseeing something so important. No more ATI-guys winging it.

[Wombat]

Well, inside a CPU are different, specialized units (floating point, integer, ...) to increase performance. Adding additional specialized units would increase perfomance, as long as there is sufficiant work for them.

No, not really. There are many reasons for this, but one of the clearest is that for video display, data in << data out. CPUs have other things to spend their bandwidth on, and aren't well suited for the large pipes out that video processors have to their memory.

[Evildead666]

Via Epia's in Mini PC's are selling pretty good, and Via seem to be long before they get anything new out the door.
WHy not use Geode/AthlonXP and a small ati GPU together to compete against the Via Luke setup?
This would mean small, embedded devices, with Athlon XP Power and ATi Graphics power. In one chip.
On a 17cm² or 12cm² board?
Sweet or what ?

edit: They have all they need to release a fully fledged mini or micro ITX board.