AMD & ATI what will the future bring?

[Wolverine690]

Wasn't sure where to put this as it kinda covers a few different areas but I think graphics would be the best place so here it is. Anyhow since I work graves & sit in front of a pc all night I usually have nothing better to so then ramble on about weird stuff, gives me something other to do while on calls or off them.lol

Anyhow on to the topic at hand...

With the merger of AMD & ATI a lot of people have guessed as to what that may bring up in the future for motherboards, CPU's & GPU's. CPU & GPU's in one chip or GPU chip like a CPU that would jsut drop onto the motherboard etc.

I think having a CPU & GPU in one would be bad idea as would make upgrading a pain in the butt as would would have to upgrade both everytime you wanted to upgrade just 1 of them.

I think a better route would be to have a GPU chip much like the CPU. Have it drop in to a little craddle like thing and slap a fan on it. then have separate memory connectors for your video ram & make it work with standard RAM so you could just use whatever your board uses & make it easy to upgrade your memory for it. So you could have 256, 512, 1GB etc, maybe have 2 slots for sticks. So you could upgrade your GPU & the memory at different times. I think this would be an interesting route, not sure how plausable or efficient it would be.

[xnewnx]

I like that idea of a drop in gpu chip and its own ram slots. i think it would be awsome. the first thing that came to mind is im wondering how the latency times between the ram/gpu on one card as it is now. or seperate like the cpu/ram is now.
i'm not sure if they're equal or slower/faster in either combination. but i definatly like the idea.
another thing that just crossed my mind. is do GPU's have their own memory controler on them like amd's cpus now? or is it seperate on the board? (i dont think its seperate). or if thats even a problem....anyway, interesting to think about for sure.

[Neural Net]

That would be fine for those who only need integrated graphics, but a disadvantage to everyone else, seeing as main system RAM is far from the speeds and bandwidth of dedicated video RAM. It would probably make overclocking very difficult as well if the GPU was on the same die as the CPU. A different socket may make things easier but I can't see how it would be any better than the current situation.

I do actually like the idea, but it would be a step backwards in terms of performance considering the memory, unless you could then buy motherboards that support DDR3 RAM, which would be cool, but also pretty expensive.

If this happens for low end integrated graphics solutions then it could be a good thing, but I don't see it being an advantage to anyone on these boards, not with all the bottlenecks it would hit.

However if they released a solution like you mentioned (connections to own dedicated video RAM and system RAM) that would be a different story altogether. You could determine how much video RAM and what type you wanted. So you could select a midrange GPU and buy 512MB of RAM, or a highend GPU with 1GB video RAM etc. Now that sounds like a great idea. :)

It would probably raise the cost of the motherboards quite a bit, but may make prices for GPUs more competitive (if nVidia got in on it) and also hopefully bring video RAM prices down. However it would probably be the end of SLI/Crossfire as we know it, and getting a motherboard with a CPU socket, two GPU sockets and more dedicated video RAM slots would be even more expensive... :)

[xnewnx]

Yeah like you're saying, if the ram for the GPU was in slots seperate like the cpu's is now would drastically lower the bandwidth and such then it would be a step back. i just think its an interesting concept, you could start popping in dual core gpu's along side your dual core cpu (cpu's would probably be always more advanced (more cores) then the gpu though).

Since AMD bought ATI they could start making their GPU's in their cpu fabs. and i would be interested to know if they could some how convert their fabs a little to make a dual core gpu, kinda like a gpu version of an X2.

of course there are other little problems with the idea long the way...two giant heatsinks, one for the cpu one for the gpu. how you'd connect your moniter without the pcb of the card there. stuff like that. but i think i'd like it a lot more then the set up now. much more customizable with different gpu/ram configurations.