Talking Heads: Motherboard Manager Edition, Q4'10, Part 1

Features
By Andrew Ku, Chris Angelini
published

We've already talked to product managers representing the graphics industry. But what about the motherboard folks? We are back with ten more unidentified R&D insiders. The platform-oriented industry weighs in on Intel's, AMD's, and Nvidia's prospects.

The Motherboard Survey: Early Q4 2010

This is the first in what is to be a long series of surveys compiled from leading technical people in the motherboard business. This is going to mirror what we have been doing with the graphics survey. You're probably asking again, who is participating? What type of motherboard manufacturers are they: ODM, OEM, or some channel brand? The point of any survey is to get a variety of differing viewpoints, so it is a detriment if we leave anyone out. For that reason, if a company out there makes a motherboard, there is a very high chance we got them involved with our survey.

This specific survey is supposed to be the flip side of the Graphic Card Survey. There are two sides of the desktop graphics business: discrete and integrated. The vendors involved in discrete sales already weighed in, and we want the opinions of their peers.

  • There is an increasing move away from emphasizing raw clock rates in favor of parallelized multi-core designs. Do you think this will change as CPU/GPU hybrids take advantage of GPGPU programming, such as DirectCompute, CUDA, and Stream, easing the CPU's role in tasks that once relied on threaded processors for their performance?
  • Will there come a time when integrated graphics with programmable logic (like Sandy Bridge and Llano) make discrete graphics unnecessary?
  • One year from now, do you continue to see Nvidia active in designing chipsets, or will the company focus on its core business (discrete graphics solutions)?
  • The success of hybrid CPU/GPU designs like Sandy Bridge and Llano is closely tied to GPGPU programming. In the last major tech cycle, system integrators and consumers successfully adopted x86-64 processors and operating systems. Yet, potential benefits have been delayed because programmers, even today, are slow to adopt 64-bit programming. Do you think Intel and AMD can cause a major shift towards general purpose GPU programming within a year of their product launches?
  • CPU/GPU hybrid designs like Sandy Bridge and Llano potentially mitigate the need for a separate graphics card. Historically, integrated graphics have been inadequate for everything above entry-level desktops. Do you think the integrated graphics from the first generation of CPU/GPU hybrids are powerful enough to drive workstations and high-end desktops?

Ground Rules

We are inevitably dealing with sensitive topics here, including industry trade secrets, proprietary company strategies, and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) pertaining to unannounced products. We want to make it clear that we fully support and believe in the purpose of NDAs and the preservation of industry secrets, as well as company strategies. These make our industry stronger, not weaker. For example, if Intel was able to change early in its Tick-Tock cycle to develop a product specifically to address the leaked specifications of an upcoming AMD processor, all of the investment capital from that leaked project becomes a sunk cost.

For this reason, information regarding industry trade secrets and proprietary company strategies is edited out, unless it's already considered common knowledge. It’s interesting information, of course, but it really doesn’t serve any purpose other than journalistic sensationalism. Information relating to specific products is generally withheld, minus a few exceptions. Information regarding specific product releases is edited to the quarter, rather than pointing at specific dates. First amendment and fourth estate aside, we are not bound by any NDAs pertaining to what our sources are telling us (NDAs usually come into play when the press gets samples close to the date of announcement).

Additionally, Chris and I have made the executive decision to withhold all participant names and the names of their respective companies for the following reasons.

  • The identity of our participants serves no real purpose for the sake of the article. It is what they say that matters.
  • Our participants now have the freedom to say whatever is on their minds, free from their company’s legal and media relation teams, without risking getting into trouble.
  • We need this to be an ongoing survey. Anything that can get these people into hot water means an ongoing industry dialogue will be cut very short.
Andrew Ku
35 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dannyboy3210
    I seem to have this nagging feeling that discrete graphics options will probably be around for another 10-15 years, at the least.
    If you factor the fact that getting a fusion of cpu/gpu will cost a bit more than a simple cpu, if you plan on doing any gaming at all, why not invest an extra 30$ or so (over the cost of cpu/gpu fusion, not just cpu) and get something that will game like twice as well and likely have support for more monitors to boot?

    Edit: Although after the slow release of Fermi, I bet everyone's wondering what exactly is in store for Nvidia in the near future; like this article says, there seems to be a lot of ambivalence on the subject.
    Reply
  • sudeshc
    I would rather like improvements in chipsets then in CPU GPU they already are doing a wow job, but we need chipsets with less and less limitation and bottlenecks.
    Reply
  • ta152h
    I'm kind of confused why you guys are jumping on 64-bit code not being common. There's no point for most applications, unless you like taking more memory and running slower. 32-bit code is denser, and therefore improves cache hit rates, and helps other apps have higher cache hit rates.

    Unless you need more memory, or are adding numbers more than over 2 billion, there's absolutely no point in it. 8-bit to 16-bit was huge, since adding over 128 is pretty common. 16-bit to 32-bit was huge, because segments were a pain in the neck, and 32-bit mode essentially removed that. Plus, adding over 32K isn't that uncommon. 64-bit mode adds some registers, and things like that, but even with that, often times is slower than 32-bit coding.

    SSE and SSE2 would be better comparisons. Four years after they were introduced, they had pretty good support.

    It's hard to imagine discrete graphic cards lasting indefinitely. They will more likely go the way of the math co-processor, but not in the near future. Low latency should make a big difference, but I would guess it might not happen unless Intel introduces a uniform instruction set, or basically adds it to the processor/GPU complex, for graphics cards, which would allow for greater compiler efficiency, and stronger integration. I'm a little surprised they haven't attempted to, but that would leave NVIDIA out in the cold, and maybe there are non-technical reasons they haven't done that yet.
    Reply
  • sohaib_96
    cant we get an integrated gpu as powerful as a discrete one??
    Reply
  • Draven35
    CUDA was a fairly robust interface from the get-go. If you wanted to do any sort of scientific computational work, Nvidia's CUDA was the library to use. It set the standard. Unfortunately, as with many technologies in the PC industry kept proprietary, this has also limited CUDA's appeal beyond specialized scientific applications, where the software is so niche that it can demand a certain piece of hardware.

    A lot of scientific software vendors I have communicated with about this sort of thing actually have been hesitant to code for CUDA because until the release of the Fermi cards, the floating-point support in CUDA was only single-precision floating point. They were *very* excited about the hardware releases at SIGGRAPH...
    Reply
  • enzo matrix
    Odd how everyone ignored workstation graphics, even when asked about them in the last question.
    Reply
  • K2N hater
    That will only replace discrete video cards once motherboards ship with dedicated RAM for video and the CPU allows a dedicated bus for that.

    Until then the performance of the processors with integrated GPU will be pretty much the same as platforms with integrated graphics as the bottleneck will still be RAM latency and bandwidth.
    Reply
  • elbert
    The death of discrete will never occur because the hybrids are limited like consoles. Even if the CPU makers could place large amounts of resources on the hybrid GPU they will be stripped away by refreshes. The margin of error being estimating how many thought motherboard integrated graphics would kill discrete kind of kills the percentages.

    From what I have read AMD's Llano hybrid gpu is about the equal to a 5570. Llano by next year has no chance of killing sales of $50+ discrete solutions. I think they hybrids will have little effect on discrete solutions and your $150+ is off. The only thing hybrid means is potentially more CPU performance when a discrete is used. Another difference will be unlike motherboard integrated GPU's going to waste the hybrids will use the integrated GPU for other tasks.
    Reply
  • Onus
    sohaib_96cant we get an integrated gpu as powerful as a discrete one??No. There are two reasons that come to my mind. The first is heat. It is hard to dissipate that much heat in such a small area. Look at how huge both graphics card and CPU coolers already are, even the stock ones.
    The second is defect rate in manufacturing. As the die gets bigger, the chances of a defect grow, and it's either a geometric or exponential growth. The yields would be so low as to make the "good" dies prohibitively expensive.
    If you scale either of those down enough to overcome these problems, you end up with something too weak to be useful.
    Reply
  • Onus
    elbert...From what I have read AMD's Llano hybrid gpu is about the equal to a 5570. Llano by next year has no chance of killing sales of $50+ discrete solutions...Although the reasoning around this is mostly sound, I'd say your price point is off. Make that $100+ discrete solutions. A typical home user will be quite satisfied with HD5570-level performance, even able to play many games using lowered settings and/or resolution. As economic realities cause people to choose to do more with less, they will realize that this level of performance will do quite nicely for them. A $50 discrete card doesn't add a whole lot, but $100 very definitely does, and might be the jump that becomes worth taking.
    Reply