In a recent interview with VR-Zone, AMD’s VP of channel sales Roy Tayor said that Nvidia's CUDA is doomed, and PhysX is an utter failure. Why? Because the industry doesn't like proprietary standards. Companies could get away with it in the early days of gaming, and it worked. But today, in a world of multiple platforms and form factors, proprietary standards are deemed unhealthy for the industry, and nobody wants it.
"Nvidia should be congratulated for its invention," he said. "As a trend, GPGPU is absolutely fantastic and fabulous. But that was then, this is now. Now, collectively our industry doesn’t want a proprietary standard. That’s why people are migrating to OpenCL."
For the uninitiated, OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is an open standard (framework) for cross-platform, parallel programming of processors (CPU,s GPUs, DSPs etc) used in mobile devices, servers and personal computers. It's maintained by the Khronos Group and adopted by Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung and several others.
In the interview Taylor also pointed to Intel's Sandy Bridge platform in which 17 percent of the die was GPU, Ivy Bridge which went up to 27 percent and Haswell around 32 percent. There's definitely a pattern, he said, and believes that Intel will eventually adopt the term APU much like ATI was forced to ditch the visual processing unit (VPU) label it began using in 2002 after the launch of the Radeon 9700.
"We think the reason they’re doing that is because of GPGPU," he said. "It’s not because of games. I think they see that HSA is an absolutely unstoppable force. I just don’t know why they don’t call [Haswell] an APU… it seems just like pride. If you remember [ATI] tried to join the coin term VPU… ‘No, no, no, it’s a VPU not a GPU,’ they would say. GPU just became widely adopted they just quietly adopted it, and I believe Intel will do the same. Look [Intel] it’s an APU, why are you protesting?"
As for SoCs with GPU cores versus standalone graphics cards, he believes there will always be a market for enthusiast gamers wanting the latter option. However there are some signs that APUs are eroding the lower-middle end discrete graphics card market.
"For enthusiast gamers, graphics cards will never go away," he said. "Unlike our competitor, who’s obsessed with launching consoles in the mobile market, we still love PC gamers and we’re absolutely committed to them. That’s never going to go away. Nobody should have any doubt that we’re committed to GPUs."
To read the full interview, head here.
