AMD assumed four years ago that the software industry would migrate to distributing the workload more efficiently by utilizing the GPU instead of pushing everything through the CPU. Doing this allows the GPU to process parallel data much more efficiently than having the CPU perform the same tasks. At the same time, the CPU's burden is reduced and it has the ability to concentrate on tasks it performs best on.
However, even though by taking this approach would have had impressive gains on most software, the software industry, for the most part, opted to still develop their wares by pushing everything through the CPU. They most likely stayed the course because Intel was and still is the most dominant processor used around the world. Intel has a very strong single threaded core that can process data in a sufficient manner but in many cases not the optimal manner.
So Intel has had market power and pricing power thanks to the software industry designing towards their CPU architecture.
However, more and more software firms have just started to move toward multi-core GPU intensive processing. The most obvious being DirectX 12 by Microsoft. The beta version of this pending release shows CPU usage dropping dramatically.
So by 2017when all game releases will be launched using DirectX 12 it would be very possible to use a very weak CPU aligned with a top tier GPU to max out all future games.
The GPU will be the only factor in determining what level you want to game at. Even more so than now. And the same migration will happen in mainstream software, as well, only at a slower pace.
So, over the next few years, Intel will finally start a serious effort to get their GPUs up to industry standards which are currently set by AMD on the integrated GPU front.
Due to the lessened need for powerful CPU cores on IPUs you will see more die space being allocated to GPUs which will lead to IPUs having upper mid range gaming capabilities. The discrete GPU market for PCs may shrink to only the very high end. However, the ability to crossfire a dedicated mid range GPU with the integrated GPU will give you high end gaming with a very modest budget.
The GPU will migrate to the server market as it is next frontier to benefit from a GPU intensive approach.