hothardware.com — Intel moved in on a quiet little investment of a UK-based company against the backdrop of IDF the other day. And if you weren't maniacally focused on some of these things, as we are around here at HH, it would have sneaked past you, right under your nose, without so much as a twitch of your sensory circuits. However, a press release that came acro
Oct 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
kahnzaOct 12, 2006
One idea I had was to incorporate a GPU and vram sockets onto the mobo. Or even do something like that right on the addon card. It would possibly cut down on upgrade costs. And offer greater customizability.
Closed AccountOct 12, 2006
Full integration, maybe not but a tigher coupling of the CPU and GPU could very well make a lot of sense. Just think what AMD/ATI can do over a HyperTransport link. Now if Intel FINALLY makes the jump to a serial interface on a CPU, a direct connect could be interesting and plausible.
wingedflurryOct 12, 2006
+digg for Bill Nye reference!
evoguyOct 12, 2006
While it's possible (even probable) intel could combine CPU/GPU for the low-level value market, all this talk of integrating CPU/GPU is never going to affect the higher end of the value market, or the enthusiast market. GPUs are completely memory bandwidth bound, and therefore use super fast surfacemount RAMs. It's inherantly incompatible with consumer-friendly pluggable DIMM technology. The new crop of GPUs are using DDR4 while the rest of the system is using DDR2, I think this 2 memory generation gap is going to exist for a long time. There will always be a market for high-end add-in cards.
ray901Oct 12, 2006
Mojo,Good points, I agree with you. I guess I read this as them integrating the chips in a single die, much like the quad paradigms that are the rage at the moment.I very much like the idea of being able to replace/augment (read overclock) my current GPUs without interfering with my CPU. I also wonder how (if this becomes the norm) it will effect technologies such as SLI. I don't think that this would even have been contemplated had the GPU not been implemented as a non-integrated solution.
daines88Oct 13, 2006
Am I the only one that doesn't like this? If this happens now you're going to have to upgrade your processor to upgrade you graphics chip. As of now you just swap out a card. It's as if we're heading to the disposable computer.