Someone at Intel muttered something about integrating graphics into the CPU core someday.
Is this something to get wound up about now? Is this the basis for those AMD/ATI rumors?
Well, no, but it does indicate something important somewhere down the road.
Can you say P-H-O-N-E?
Think a few years down the road. Do you think you’re really going to need four or more CPU cores for any computing task you might want to do on a telephone? I didn’t think so.
Wouldn’t “computer on a chip” make a lot more sense given where it’s going to end up? Think you’re going to stick a graphics card in your phone (or update it)?
Come to think of it, aren’t a lot of current CPU trends and announcements we’re seeing at least potentially phone-friendly? The trend to lower power certainly is one, but AMD’s Torrenza idea of a modular CPU fits rather nicely into the paradigm, too, doesn’t it?
AMD and others talk and have projects meant to bring computing to what used to be called the Third World. So far, they really haven’t done too well, simply because these projects are still married to the desktop, and that’s still big, expensive and bulky (and are really aimed at people with more than average income in such places).
The modern technology that has really caught on, even in very poor, war-ravaged places, are mobile phones.
I think eventually (and we’re talking five-ten years from now), the avenue to computing for the rest of the world is not going to be some stripped-down desktop or notebook, but the mobile phone.
And just like many people in the more developed areas of the world are dropping land-line services in favor of cellphones, I think many will drop their PCs in favor of such devices sometime next decade.
In the future, I think it’s going to be the screens and keyboards and mice than are going to be fixed, and the computer phones will be mobile.
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