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Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)Posted Aug 23, 2007 18:55 UTC (Thu) by sab39 (guest, #2185)Parent article: Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)
Another relevant question is whether Intel actually make - or plan to make - standalone graphics cards at all. If you're planning to buy new hardware for an existing computer, motherboard-embedded solutions aren't as appealing.
(I only did the most cursory research on this as upgrading the computer in question is still a way in the future, but the answer seems to be "no, embedded only")
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Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) Posted Aug 23, 2007 22:00 UTC (Thu) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] Another question is whether standalone graphics is the way things are ultimately headed. Using AMD and Intel as a barometer, I'd say the forecast is for embedded graphics.
Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) Posted Aug 24, 2007 6:01 UTC (Fri) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link] Whole Intel motherboards are comparable in price to or cheaper than Nvidia video cards. You can get a board with graphics for $60.
Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) Posted Aug 24, 2007 14:30 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] look up 'Intel Larrabee' and you'll see Intel's future GPU moves. Hopefully in a couple years we will see discrete Intel graphics and the corrisponding performance improvement of having dedicated video card memory with a 16/24 core GPU.http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/clearing-... http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070604-clearing-up...
On the long-term it seems that the GPU will be integrated onto the CPU die as a speciality core for graphics and floating point performance.
Pretty soon you'll start seeing 8 or 16-way proccessors. I figure for Desktop use you pretty much lose any sort of multitasking benifits once you get over 4 or so cores. I figure that you will see very limited performance benifit from having 16 core vs 4 core cpus. So it makes sense that instead of sticking with general purpose cores you will start to see more and more specialized cores being introduced.. stuff optimized for specific workloads.
Instead of spending the money on special RAM for your video card, you simply have the fastest ram possible for your cpu with the on-die memory controller. Then from CPU to GPU you don't have to deal with any latencies or bandwidth limitations inherent with having to go through the motherboard. Also for mobile applications you can disable and enable cores on the fly for better battery management.
The dangerous part is that currently for High Performance GPU Computing from AMD/ATI and Nvidia is that the only way to access their GPUs for computing is through software interfaces, CUDA for Nvidia, and CTM for ATI. The idea is that they get to keep their hardware secret, they can change the GPU and then modify the software to keep older applications compatable, and users have a easy-to-program interface to deal with. The downsides, of course, is that all of this is proprietary software.
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