According to intel, we won't be needing gpus for the most part in the future. Maybe not for windows, but for gaming they are dead wrong. Their point of view seems to be 2-fold, sli/crossfire is not as efficient as extra cpu cores, and cpus will/can do everything gpus can. One super cpu will never be as good as one super gpu. end of. </rant>

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36758/135/

Short extract:

"Fosner told us that multi-core CPUs are more than capable of rendering complex scenes that used to be reserved for top-end graphics cards. He argued that Intel processors offered “more bang for the buck” and that it was more economical to go from single to multiple core processors versus popping multiple graphics cards into a machine. “The fact of the matter is that you’re going to have one graphics card, you may have a dual graphics card, but you’re not going to have a four graphics card or eight graphics card system,” said Fosner.

Another advantage to CPU graphics and physics programming is that people won’t need to continually keep up with the latest programming techniques of all the newest cards – this means futzing around with shader models and DirectX programming will be a thing of the past. Fosner said that “everybody” knows how to program for a CPU and that this new way of programming will “get rid of” a path of graphics obsolescence.

When asked if discrete graphics cards will be needed in the future, Fosner answered, “Probably not”. He explained that computer didn’t have discrete graphics in the 80s and that CPUs are becoming powerful enough to take over that role."

HAIL to the KING, AMD/ATI...

... JK..

This, from the same company that brought us the Graphics Media Deccelerator?



There's ALWAYS a drone...

Might be true, don't know how long it will take though. I'm interested to see future games using raytracing. Although, I'm sure nvidia will try and make a discrete card that is capable of doing ray trace calculations if need be.

lol, you said deccelerator

Intel is so full of themselves, if they believe this ****, I want to see some in game benchies, and I wanna see them now.

Diddy mow!

Dude, those graphics suck balls. What is that...Oregon Trail?

If 4 cores with 2 threads each only get a max of 18 fps with some fire. yeah...i think video will be around for a while....

I can see running all the physics off the cpus, but not both physics and graphics...

But the ray trace developers are hoping cpus will replace gpus in the future as well

All that I see is a physics demonstration. Oh yeah and the thousands of pieces that flew off the house? I saw about 20, where did the other 980 pieces go? Oooo look at the fluffy bunnies...

They are talking about the cpu doing EVERYthing in the future....its still far off

This sounds kick-ass and a very real possibility.
However, I see this happening at least sometime after DX11 (since DX11 is mostly finalized now)

When intel shows me a benchmark beating the highend ATI and Nvidia cards I will believe them. Untill then they can keep barfing all over the news.

The technology to have a CPU morph into a GPU and back again has been around for 20 years already. Called Gate-Array.
But for ray-tracing, the power needed is still far off. However, I expect some specialized ray-tracing core sometime at least 3 years away,

Also, having a CPU do everything, like what I thought you said, comes from the CPU graphics card using the same x86 instructions as the CPU. So you can run the same code on a CPU or GPU, even if both are very different things.
So future GPUs will look more like CPUs and CPUs will perform like GPUs.
Anyway, something like this.

I agree. However, I also think Intel can knock ATI and Nvidia silly if they wanted to.