http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 507,00.asp
 
Here's a great article about PC gaming and it's bright future!!
 
I'd love to hear what everyone thinks.
 
I'm too tired to write my own thoughts on this right now but I will in the next couple days.
 
http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 507,00.asp

Nice read, thanks for the link.
 
It certainly looks like this guy knows what he's talking about. Only at the end of part 2 the interview suddenly cuts short, just as they are discussing the merging of CPU and GPU (again).
 
There he is talking about Intel and AMD getting it right and at this particular point I was wondering why he did not spend some time on the fact that AMD acquired ATI, and what is going to happen to NVidia? He probably 'knows' and has some personal stake in it (shares in the right companies).

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Kind of rambling and repetitive.  He makes some good points, but it really seems he did not prepare ahead of time for the interview and just kind of stumbled around before he got to it.

 
I was wondering the same thing; how can you talk about CPUs and GPUs coming together without talking about AMD/ATI and NVidia?
 
Another very interesting point that was made in this article, was about the future of retail. It's hard to argue the fact that gaming will start becoming more virtual. I know from my past experience with EB Games that, upper management over there is truly concerned about downloadable content. Downloadable content aside, I have a hard time believing that the big retailers would stop selling hardware when they make so much money off of the accessories. The mark up can easily reach 50% on controllers and over 80% on cables...PS the mark up on monster (crap) cables is around 90%...Here's a number out of EB: Monster Cable accessories where only 1% of EB Games' sales, but accounted around 10% of their overall profit! I could see this really kind of future hurting a company like gamestop, but the big guys will still sell gaming hardware even if all games where sold online.
 
Anyways, I would love to hear more on the new CPU technology that was being discussed in this article.
 
I'm not sold on the "console on the PC" idea, however; anything that can make PC games less expensive by cutting down on piracy, there by increasing the market sounds great to me!
 

While it may be true that the annual revenue for the platform is higher, this is thanks only to World of Warcraft. This article is not an accurate representation as the market as a whole. In fact, if World of Warcraft were excluded, it's likely the PC as a gaming platform would fall behind the Wii, Xbox360, PS3, PS2, PSP and DS. He's simply "preaching to the choir" with this interview.

You have to keep in mind, there is a limited amount of money that will go toward games.  If enough money is tied up in WoW to account for the vast sales difference between PC and consoles, then that easily explains the slump.  There is just less money and a smaller audience available for those titles since a heavy percentage of PC gamers are busily playing WoW and paying for WoW instead of everything else.

Thanks for the link, that was a great interview.  I esspecially like the "vista blows" interview that followed.  I learned a few things about operating systems and how 3D games are made and intended to run.

 
 
speaking of monster cables,,reminds me that using gold for electrical connectors is no good,resistance to high,,what a con...

After reading this interview Im stunned. Ive been saying the same thing for a long time here almost word for word. Im glad somebody sees this the way I do. Intel has hurt the PC gaming industry, and whats good to say about Vista? Especially concerning gaming. What Im worried about is the influence Intel has, and since its heading into the graphics market, are they going to screw it around, putting it second to the all mighty cpu? Or have it done their way, maybe excluding say raytracing and going with something else? Something that already benefits their plans> Their hardware? Someone told me, well theyre (M$ and Intel) spending 20 million on multthreaded aps, well whoooopie, whats that? A half a game? At least someone thats been there and done that, thats a mover in the industry sees all this for what it is, and maybe will help shape the future of PC gaming

MS Vista Service Pack 2 to support DirectX 11 and Intel's ray tracing!!  
 
Here's another article to back up the first one.
 
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle [...] 526&pgno=1
 
Could be rumor, but I doubt it. Everyone knew Intel was working on it's Ray Tracing technology.

 
It really doesn't matter, because the whole thing is silly. You'll always be better off with two chips than one, except at the bottom end of the market where current integrated graphics sit and cost is the primary factor.
 
There is simply no good performance reason to put a GPU and CPU in the same chip, and I don't know what he's been smoking if he thinks that it will magically make games 5-10x faster. You have less transistors available and far less memory bandwidth; that's never going to compete against a two-chip CPU/GPU combination unless it's crippled by a very low speed bus between the two. The only benefit is that if you put a simple GPU into a low-end CPU you can potentially save a few bucks by removing one external chip from the motherboard.
 
I do tend to agree with him about consoles though; right now, selling high-end consoles seems to be just a license to lose money. Most of the high-end hardware is driven by the PC market, and sticking PC components in a box and selling below cost price doesn't seem like a good business plan.

Im thinking in much larger terms when it comes to cpu/gpu package. Like 8/16  in a package, being together, elimating bus issues mostly, and at a lower node, itll work

 
And it will still be slower than a 16-core CPU talking to a 32-core GPU on a separate card, each using the same number of transistors as your single combined chip. Nothing will change the fact that having twice as many transistors is going to give significantly faster processing, particularly when coupled with two or more times the memory bandwidth; that's precisely why we stopped using CPU-powered VGA graphics all those years ago.

Im not talking cpu, but parrallel gpus, where many is more, combined properly WITH a cpu(s)

Then of course theres raytracing...

 
And again, it will still perform worse than two chips of the same size on different boards, each with their own memory. The bus between the CPU and GPU is nowhere near the limiting factor, whereas memory bandwidth and/or raw pixel processing power usually is, so putting the GPU in the CPU with half the transistors and a fraction of the memory bandwidth makes absolutely no sense for a performance system. In addition, of course, it makes upgrading your graphics impossible without also upgrading your CPU, which is great for CPU manufacturers, but no so good for the rest of us.
 
I'm really not sure why this is so hard to understand.

 
Mark.. why do you think jaydeejohn brought up raytracing/volumetric rendering? If you want to do that efficiently then you will need quick access to large chunks of shared memory or a very quick way to tranfer data from CPU mem to GPU. That kind of render techniques require the whole volume representation that is going to be rendered to be in memory.
 
Btw, current GPU architecture is not suited for volumetric rendering but the current architecture is getting near its completion with what can be done in realistic imaging today. If you want to have the kind of quality in (realtime) graphics that  you see in movies today (not realtime), then we will need to move on, and I'm sure we will see this happening in the coming years and I am sure that it will involve getting the new VR GPU a lot closer to the CPU (sharing memory).
 
And I do understand that this is (perhaps) somewhat hard to understand, depending on how much people know about graphics rendering.

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My main concern with combining CPU and GPU into a single chip is that this new chip will be many times harder to manufacture and prices will go up.  Putting two separate chips in the same package would alleviate that to a large degree.
 
I don't see though why we could not reinvent our bus system instead of reinventing our processing system.  Just give the GPU direct access to the CPU memory.  On the other hand, why are we assuming that we cannot add a second bus for the GPU side of the chip?  Different ways of achieving the same goal.

 
Because it's the latest buzzword that's not going to go anywhere?
 

 
Even if you believe that, you've just shown that putting both CPU and GPU on a shared memory bus is a bad idea because it dramatically reduces memory bandwidth (unless you think that Joe Sixpack is going to pay for memory four or more DIMMs at a time so he can have a 256-bit memory bus or more). There is no reason why ray-tracing or volumetric rendering needs substantially more data transfer from CPU to GPU, other than because volumetric rendering uses absolutely massive amounts of RAM.
 

 
From what I remember, 3Dlabs were doing volumetric rendering on a PC GPU at least five years ago. There's absolutely no reason why it can't be done, it's just not an efficient way of rendering in anything other than specialised markets like medical imaging (where what comes out of your scanner is a volumetric representation of the body).
 

 
No, it's roughly a bazillion miles from what can be done with current architectures. Game developers could use 1000x as much power as current GPUs give them.
 

 
LOL .