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RE: Bad news for the junkie
By afkrotch on 12/3/2007 12:36:14 PM , Rating: 2
I don't see a cpu core being used for graphics. General procs just weren't designed for such. What I can see is leaving out a core and replacing it with a gpu core. I see the standard home proc being more along the lines of a mainframe style proc.

Take for example this old mainframe proc.

Imagine each block being a seperate core and being capable of placing whatever style of processor you want. You can have 50 of them set to be a general cpu, 20 for gpu, 20 for physics, and 10 for system memory. Or you can simply customize it to whatever suits your needs.

RE: Bad news for the junkie
By latrosicarius on 12/5/2007 1:09:21 PM , Rating: 2
It matters what instruction set the processor is designed to execute.

When the x86 architecture first came out, there were very few "graphics-intensive" applications like games, so screen-rendering instructions were not a big-enough deal to build into the CPU's instruction set.

After games started requiring more and more speed, they had to "invent" (or at least improve) hardware acceleration in order to keep up--thus, the GPU was born.

If they can simply add GPU instructions to the CPU's instruction set, you will be able to have "true hardware" support for games without a graphics card. The CPU will be like a graphics card.

And with multiple cores, the OS could dynamically assign more cores to execute rendering threads if the game requires more resources, just as you can dynamically assign normal threads to available cores today.


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