Nvidia says the Intel CPU is "dead"

[peaz]

Still the way a GPU is designed today is just not meant to work as well as a general CPU. GPU does very good stream processing, pushing through loads of operations of pretty much the same kind.

that's just exactly the opposite of a CPU which needs a lot of branch predictions as phok noted in order to perform well.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by peaz

Still the way a GPU is designed today is just not meant to work as well as a general CPU. GPU does very good stream processing, pushing through loads of operations of pretty much the same kind.

that's just exactly the opposite of a CPU which needs a lot of branch predictions as phok noted in order to perform well.

Yup.. which means if the industry switches to ray tracing... NVIDIA will have to change tack real fast.

[generalRage1982hrv]

that is true guys
but what if they come to cpu market with strong cpu
what will hapen to AMD ????

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by generalRage1982hrv

that is true guys
but what if they come to cpu market with strong cpu
what will hapen to AMD ????

AMD? They will have to really buck up... or sink.

[generalRage1982hrv]

Originally Posted by Adrian Wong

AMD? They will have to really buck up... or sink.

it would be bad to see them fall down
if that happen we will see massive rise of prices on computer parts and that is wrong
only rich people would be able to buy new stuff

[Zenphic]

Originally Posted by generalRage1982hrv

take a look on gpu core
it is more complex than a cpu core and it have much higher bandwidth(flow of data) and much higher speeds because shader processors are not working like cpu processor each separately
they are working linked and that is giving more power and data calculation than a cpu cores
it is not hard to use old g80 core to work like a extension to cpu and that will force more data calculation and more hmmmmm simply power
so if they use that technology on cores it will kill everything in its way

I agree that GPU cores have a lot of potential, but I doubt that its technologies can be easily adapted to a CPU. Afterall, AMD does own ATI, and if GPU to CPU was easy enough, then AMD should have done some advances by now

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by generalRage1982hrv

it would be bad to see them fall down
if that happen we will see massive rise of prices on computer parts and that is wrong
only rich people would be able to buy new stuff

Yeah, let's just hope they buck up real quick.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Zenphic

I agree that GPU cores have a lot of potential, but I doubt that its technologies can be easily adapted to a CPU. Afterall, AMD does own ATI, and if GPU to CPU was easy enough, then AMD should have done some advances by now

Well, even if the industry does transition to ray tracing, it will take many years. In the meantime, games are still rendered in raster.

If AMD knew that the future would be ray tracing for sure, I don't think they would have bothered merging with ATI.

[generalRage1982hrv]

Building a CPU to compete with Intel?
The discussion then moved back to CPUs because, after all, Kirk believes that AMD's days are numbered. The question is: will Nvidia build a CPU to balance the market out if AMD's future is as gloomy as Kirk makes out? After all, Nvidia's APX2500 is a system on a chip and features an ARM-based CPU core on die, so it's not as if the company can't build a CPU... it's just a matter of whether it wants to, right?

“Building a CPU is not that hard,” claimed Kirk.

“What Intel does well is not just building good CPUs, it’s the fact that they’re a vertically integrated manufacturing company – Intel’s in the business of turning sand into money.

"In the middle of that there is the semi-conductor process and the design of the CPUs, but really if you took away the process advantage that Intel had, they would be behind AMD pretty consistently in terms of architecture. They win because they build an efficient and faster process. Who was the last CEO of Intel?” he asked.

It was Craig Barratt of course.

“That’s right, he’s the process guy," David said. "So for the last ten or twelve years, that’s when they’ve really been excelling. Architecturally though, they’ve been behind AMD for some time – the Athlon architecture is a better architecture because the integrated bus controller is a better approach.

Intel is finally going to catch up with Nehalem." I thought his assessment of the Athlon being a better architecture was a little bit off when the Core 2 Duo is so much faster than the current AMD processors on a clock for clock basis, but there's no denying that it's a more elegant architecture.

“Anyway, back to your question about us building a CPU,” said David in an attempt to bring the discussion back onto the topic. “I think that if we were to compete with Intel, we would need to become a vertically integrated company and have our own fabs.”

Intel's process technology advantage
So, with this in mind, if Kirk has underestimated Intel and it builds a GPU that is very competitive, will Intel’s process technology advantage be a problem for Nvidia? “Well, definitely maybe,” he said. “The reason I would say maybe is: are they willing to take their most advanced process technology capacity and use it on GPUs? GPUs are much bigger than CPUs, so in the same capacity that they could build 100 million CPUs, they could build 20 million GPUs.

“So taking into account how much money you can make on a Core 2 Duo, can you make five times more from a GPU?” asked Kirk. No, of course not, I said. But having said that, surely Larrabee is an indication that Intel feels that massive threading is the future. “I think massive threading is the future, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to build a competitive GPU,” he responded.

“Think about where Larrabee is going to sell – is that going to be a high-end product?” Of course, it’s difficult to say without actually knowing what Larrabee is at this point in time. “OK, well think about it this way: I’m guessing that it’ll probably cost them about one thousand dollars a chip to build Larrabee.

Kirk believes that Intel's process technology advantage might play a role in their impending war, but he's sceptical of whether Intel would commit to making such large chips on its latest silicon technology.

“What I think about Larrabee is that Intel is struggling with falling ASPs in their market because many people are starting to realise that the CPU is adequate for most things they want to do. Intel looks around and they say ‘ok, there’s some billion dollars over there, those ought to be mine!’” said David while laughing. “There’s no logic to it other than that ‘it’s my money over there and I want it’.

“They’re the world’s leading designers and manufacturers of CPUs – how hard could it be to build a GPU? I mean, come on, how hard could it be? That crummy little company down the road builds them – we could build them in our sleep. Come on, how hard could it be?” asked David in a rather rhetorical fashion. Of course, he knew that I couldn’t answer that question because I’m not a GPU designer.

“Well, neither are they,” he perked. “And that’s why they can’t answer it either.”

We'd like to thank David for taking time out of his busy schedule for what was a very interesting discussion about the future of the industry from Nvidia's perspective.

here is some interesting stuff for you guys
>>>Nvidia's David Kirk on CUDA, CPUs and GPUs<<<read full interview here

[Mac Daddy]

I gave this a quick read and bookmarked it to read more thoroughly later .. THX for the post Bro