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NVIDIA trumpets the death of the CPU

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NVIDIA trumpets the death of the CPU

from Stardock Forums

The recent conflict between Intel and Nvidia moved from the market to the personal arena, where the two competitors are throwing offenses at will. The latest hit comes from one of Nvidia's vice-presidents, in a private e-mail message claiming that the CPU is dead and has long since run out of steam.

The private mail message was intercepted by tech website Inquirer, and holds Roy Tayler's opinions regarding Intel's central processors. The letter is dated April 10, but the final recipient is currently unknown.

"Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. It’s run out of steam. The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and it’s why Intel are panicking," Tayler claimed in the message.

"They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still [need] one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This s*** is just interesting as hell," he continued.

However, Nvidia claims that the above message does not reflect any official stance whatsoever. According to the company’s spokesman Brian Burke, the message is not a public statement and "the views in Roy Tayler's e-mail do not mirror the views of Nvidia."

It might be true that the e-mail message reflects Tayler's own opinions, yet, the company stated a while ago that "you need nothing beyond the most basic CPU," in order to get things done. This means that Nvidia thinks that the CPU might not be dead yet, but it's just one step closer to its grave.

Intel, of course, completely disagrees with Nvidia's allegations. It couldn't be otherwise, given the fact that the company is at the moment the biggest CPU manufacturer in the world and its CPU business accounts for the lion's share of the revenue.

"We believe that both a great CPU and great graphics are important in a PC. Any PC purchase - including the capability level of components inside it - is a decision that each user must make based on what they will be doing with that PC," said Intel spokesperson Dan Snyder

This was taken from Softpedia.com

109,077 views 39 replies
Reply #26 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
plus if you add a dedicated physic's processor that probably going to work alot better the closer it is to the GPU.
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Um, no.

There are two uses for physics in a game. One use is for something that is entirely graphical. Particle systems that don't affect gameplay (outside of obscuring the screen in some way), exploding bits of stuff that don't affect gameplay, etc. That can be done through GPUs entirely, especially now with write-back in GPUs thanks to geometry shaders. You don't need a separate physics processor for it.

The other kind of use for physics is for things that do affect gameplay. HL2, for example. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of physics that you can just say, "Do this," and retrieve the answer afterwards. The game's code, possibly even the script, has to be involved. You need to be able to set rules that are entirely arbitrary. Collision detection needs to be forwarded to the AI and game systems, so that they can assign damage, delete entities, and all of that good stuff. In short, this is not stuff that's good for assigning to a separate processor. There's a reason why physics chips didn't take off.

It is much easier for a game developer to just use more CPU cores to do physics than to use an off-board physics chip.

I think whats going on is Intel screaming out to NVIDIA that there about to seriously enter the graphics market and NVIDIA pretty much answering back go ahead we have years of RnD on you, oh and just like your trying to incorporate the GPU and CPU we can do the same thing on our end. NVIDIA has the upper hand in terms of the technology and Intel in terms of the market should be interesting to see how it plays out over the next 5-10 years.
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Yeah, the problem is that, while nVidia has years of R&D for graphics chips, they don't have something that Intel does: the x86 Instruction Set Architecture.

As terrible and annoying as x86 is, it is the closest thing to a lingua franca that assembly has. Millions of man-hours have been invested in compiler design for x86. People have millions of lines of code written in it. There are terabytes of x86 executables out there.

Using x86, or a derivative thereof, as a GPU's shading language may be slightly less inefficient than a specialized shading language, but it's x86. Every time something has gone against x86, claiming better efficiency, it has lost. Why? Because the efficiency difference is never enough to trump the value of x86 and its backwards compatibility to code compiled 15 years ago.
Reply #27 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The guy from NVIDIA is essentially right there's really not alot of growth for CPU's
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There is, actually. They're going parallel, and in the future massively parallel. And if there's anybody who knows all about the technology on microchips, it's Intel. I'm not buying this idea that nVidia has the upper hand in microprocessor design. If Intel wants something done, they have both the R&D and the manpower to do it. They're like a battleship: They may take a while to change to a new direction - but once they've changed direction, watch out - they have a lot of firepower. AMD knows this quite well.

As terrible and annoying as x86 is, it is the closest thing to a lingua franca that assembly has. Millions of man-hours have been invested in compiler design for x86. People have millions of lines of code written in it. There are terabytes of x86 executables out there.
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Yup. Totally agreed. Again and again, the x86 has reigned simply because of its tremendous backwards compatibility. Pretty much everything we care about is written for the x86. If you can't beat Intel in x86 code performance, you're never going to penetrate the CPU market, I don't care what new features you bring to the table.
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top
Another pc is dead topic, time to shut the fuck up and use some real logic.
Reply #29 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
wasn't this news like 2 months ago?

i think the launch of the GTX 200 series shows just how much hot air nVidia is full of. i'm not saying the HD 4k series is the best thing to ever grace this earth, but for all its talk, nVidia pull a very large citrus fruit out of its back side, put green stickers on it, and tried to tell us it's great.

a note to the general public: nVidia is trying to create a public image. it's the same one that Johnny Knocksville is going for: a big, adolescent jack@$$
Reply #30 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Another pc is dead topic, time to shut the fuck up and use some real logic.
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Pay attention; this is about CPUs, not PCs. Perhaps you should take your own advice.

i think the launch of the GTX 200 series shows just how much hot air nVidia is full of. i'm not saying the HD 4k series is the best thing to ever grace this earth, but for all its talk, nVidia pull a very large citrus fruit out of its back side, put green stickers on it, and tried to tell us it's great.
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To be fair, 6 months ago, nVidia's 8800GT was the best price vs. performance there was. Now ATi is (though it isn't nearly enough of an advantage to make me upset at getting an 8800GT). nVidia will take it back next time. That's pretty much how graphics cards go.
Reply #31 from JoeUser Forums Top

I like my CPU. I think it's as important as my graphics card. And it works better.

Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
Beacause the QC Extremes are so underpowered.... yeah i really need to take my own advice...
Reply #33 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
To be fair, 6 months ago, nVidia's 8800GT was the best price vs. performance there was. Now ATi is (though it isn't nearly enough of an advantage to make me upset at getting an 8800GT). nVidia will take it back next time. That's pretty much how graphics cards go.
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this is true, no doubt. i almost pressed the button on a G92 8800GTS myself. and i'll admit that i'm biased against nvidia. i just don't like the way they do business. between the confusing over-abundance of product variations, the UMAP program, their penchant for public trash talking, and their implementation of SLI tied to their horrible chipsets, i'm just over them. unfortunately eVGA, XFX and BFG tech seem to me some of the best AIB partners around, while several of ATI's partners have earned reputations for poor product support. c'est la vie.
Reply #34 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The real point is the growth path of the GPU is much higher than the CPU.

There simply are not enough applications forcing you to need faster and faster CPUs, where as on the graphics end there is still plenty of need.

What's missing from this email however, is that CPUs now need to start getting much more parellel in nature. The limiting factor there has been software design and complexity. To me that's the path that needs to happen for the CPU folks, make it easier to do multi-processor friendly software.

Reply #35 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) tools within the new line of Nvidia's graphic cards are suppose to assist with intensive computational process that is not graphics related. The thing is many people don't need that type of processing power for their applications. The process that require such computational powers are like computation of matters related to fluid dyamics or astrophysics. But then..if you work in those areas and you really need such intense computational processes help, there are always super computer which can be accessed via the World wide web.
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
The CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) tools within the new line of Nvidia's graphic cards are suppose to assist with intensive computational process that is not graphics related. The thing is many people don't need that type of processing power for their applications. The process that require such computational powers are like computation of matters related to fluid dyamics or astrophysics. But then..if you work in those areas and you really need such intense computational processes help, there are always super computer which can be accessed via the World wide web.
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Some companies that don't want their data transferring over the internet, as it isn't secure. They will benefit as their own computers would see the computational benefits. Besides, most groups who are doing intense tasks such as those generally have large funds backing them or are associated with large companies who can provide indefinite amount of cash.
Reply #37 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) tools within the new line of Nvidia's graphic cards are suppose to assist with intensive computational process that is not graphics related.
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CUDA is basically a way to translate C into nVidia's native instruction set. it was mainly developed to run PhysX, but it makes nvidia GPUs capable of performing a great many types of task. this is what led nvidia to "trumpet the death of the CPU," but it's far from perfect as a central processor (and their claim was mainly marketing fluff). mainly highly parallelized applications heavy on floating point operations will really benefit significantly. i guess in theory if they ever manage to get the SP clocks into the gigahertz range, but i wouldn't bet on seeing that anytime soon, since from what i understand, the development of GPUs tends to favor more SPs rather than faster SPs. some applications might always benefit from a single, faster processor, and 'multi-tasking' can only go so far, at least for the home user.

of course, there are far greater experts on this than i, so take it with a grain of salt.

The thing is many people don't need that type of processing power for their applications.
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more applications are starting to be multi-threaded, but i don't think there will be many that can use all 240 stream processors on a GTX 280.

The process that require such computational powers are like computation of matters related to fluid dyamics or astrophysics. But then..if you work in those areas and you really need such intense computational processes help, there are always super computer which can be accessed via the World wide web.
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well, yes and no. some problems are too complex even for IBM's roadrunner and its 1.0 petaFLOPS. take standford's fold@home client. if you're unfamilar with this distributed computing project, it's designed to use your home desktop's unused computation cycles to help us understand the way proteins fold and mis-fold, hopefully helping us (well, stanford researchers anyway) find cures for a number of diseases. this is where CUDA comes in. it'll allow you to run a GPU version of the F@H DCP as well as one on your CPU(s).

and since i'm on the subject, i gotta plug my home team:
www.hardfolding.com

:HOT:
Reply #38 from Sins Forums Top
I seem to recall an article in a PC Gamer or the defunct GFW interviewing Gabe Newell (I believe) about the death of the GPU. Something about why have two processors when they can now be combined into one multicore processor. Why not have a multicore processor where 4 are cpu's and 2 are gpu's? One processor to rule them all.
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Here is the first proof that this will take place...okay, rumored proof. But still, AMD is supposedly going to combine the CPU and GPU into one processor chip. It should be interesting to see how it works out.

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-38703-135.html

Sorry, forgot the link.
Reply #39 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i don't see that article as "proof" necessarily. it could simply be that they're slapping a CPU and GPU onto the same die the way intel slapped two dual cores onto the same die for its quad core.

does that matter? well, not to joe consumer, at least probably not. technically this isn't the death of the CPU or GPU, but rather the death of the discreet graphics card. there's potential to lower latency for CPU-GPU communication, but GPU performance will be severely limited by its need to rely on DDR2 memory (phenoms don't support DDR3, which is still far from optimal for graphics, that's why all graphics cards moved to GDDR in the first place).

when i read "it will be a dual-core phenom wth an R800 graphics core," i interpret "budget solution." so the technical specifics won't matter to the consumer aiming at the bottom line, but tech savvy enthusiasts and quality OEMs will still be using dedicated discreet graphics cards for a while yet.

what nVidia would have you believe is that GPU architecture can completely supplant the CPU, and what AMD here has is by contrast a fraternal-Siamese core. all they're really doing is moving their IGPs off the motherboard and into the CPU die.

/$0.02