Intel, AMD Telegraph Increased Importance Of Graphics Processing EnginesIntel, AMD Telegraph Increased Importance Of Graphics Processing Engines

Intel CEO Paul Otellini touched all the obvious buttons in his keynote at the chipmaker's Developer Forum in San Francisco, emphasizing the rush toward more cores and smaller (read: 45-nm and 32-nm) process technology. However, a deeper analysis of the news out of IDF indicates that there's one trend no one is talking about.That would be the huge potential role graphics chips -- more properly, graphics processing units, or GPUs -- could play in just a few short years. You might say this observation is obvious, because Intel did indeed talk about some of its GPU plans at IDF.

My point, though, is that what Intel is doing is more than just a competitive thrust aimed at AMD, which now owns the graphics chip house ATI, or at Nvidia, the other graphics powerhouse. In a business sense, yes, Intel is protecting its flank.

However, my interest in GPUs is much broader. What I'm saying is that GPUs might very soon become more important than all the regular multicore microprocessors we've been getting so hot and bothered about lately.

The reason is as follows. Heretofore, GPUs have been thought of as specialty processors designed especially for speedy handling of, for example, matrix operations required by video applications. Accordingly, their use and application has been technologically ghettoized, on the gaming, supercomputing, and medical imaging corners of the industry. So, while GPUs have been important, they haven't been seen as mainstream items with broad applicability.

That's about to change, it's happening all of a sudden, and, I'd argue, no one has really seen it coming. More correctly, none of the graphics-chips gurus has prepared the rest of the industry for this event.

I'd argue that we'll be able to look back in several year's time and consider 2008 an inflection point when graphics processing became mainstream.

Consider these three data points, which I present as evidence:

Intel's Larrabee Intel is planning an eight-core processor, code-named Larrabee, which will deliver very high-performance graphics and support high-performance computing needs. Word of the project emerged out of the Asian edition of IDF back in April, and Intel talked about it more this week at IDF. AMD's Eagle Eagle is AMD's notebook platform, planned for 2009. Not only does it have a dedicated GPU, but it's got a separate GPU core within the main microprocessor (aka CPU) itself. This means AMD is going full-tilt to integrate the smarts of ATI, the aforementioned graphics company it now owns, into its "mainstream" processors.

AMD's notebook platform road map.(Click picture to enlarge.)
This "regularizing" of graphics alongside central processing is something that's been long expected, but hasn't previously come to pass. Now, conditions are ripe. On the tech side, they're ripe because we've got the process technology that supports the transistor counts required to etch GPU and CPU side-by-side. On the business side, they're ripe because AMD's ownership of ATI has sent Intel into a graphics frenzy, taking the war between the two companies into the graphics realm. Nvidia My last bit of evidence is not as neat, but I'll put it forward anyway. Nvidia is mostly thought of as a graphics-chip supplier to the PC industry. That's true, it is. However, I was extremely interested to see Nvidia hosting its own booth at the High Performance on Wall Street conference the other day. Nvidia was there to present its graphics processors to the developers who run high-end clusters for advanced stock-trading systems. That's significant because Nvidia wasn't showcasing them as graphics engines per se (although that was certainly part of the sell), but as processors to which significant tasks could be assigned, to maintain and even boost system throughput. Yep, keep an eye on those GPUs.