Mind share shift from CPU to GPU, Intel to Nvidia?

As Intel took its case against Nvidia to court, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang could not resist making the oft-repeated assertion that the GPU is in, and CPU is out--a thinly veiled reference to the graphics chip maker's credo that PC processor mind share is shifting from Intel to Nvidia.

Here is the statement that Huang inserted into the Thursday Nvidia release about the Intel court filing. "At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course, and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business." (CPU stands for central processing unit; GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

This is not the first time Huang has said this. He said--now rather famously--last year that Nvidia was going to "open up a can of whoop-ass" on Intel when responding to a question about Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics technology. He has also said many times in many forums that Intel's CPUs are "good enough"--not so thinly veiled code for: Intel CPU technology is past its prime.

So, the question must be posed: is he right? Are consumers placing more importance on the GPU than the CPU? And, maybe more importantly, are PC and chipmakers now putting significantly more development and marketing resources into all things GPU?

A quick answer to the first question is that consumers expect PCs to perform better when handling Web-based graphics, games, and video. So, yes, consciously or unconsciously, consumers are putting more emphasis on the GPU.

And there's a short answer to the latter question too: Advanced Micro Devices. If you look at AMD's Puma laptop platform, for example, there is an increased emphasis on graphics as being the performance driver of the platform. And certainly, as a chipmaker, the graphics technology from its ATI unit is making more of a mark these days than its CPUs.

But that doesn't mean the momentum is necessarily in Nvidia's (or ATI's) favor. The biggest sea change occurring in the PC market today is the not the shift from the CPU to the GPU, but the shift from mainstream laptops to inexpensive laptops, aka Netbooks. And right now, that market is all Intel, all the time.

"The bigger dramatic change that's happening in the industry is the en masse migration to low-cost solutions...Netbooks," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. He says Intel integrated graphics, in this sense, may pose more, not less, of a challenge in the future for Nvidia.

And the Netbook market demonstrates probably more than anything what the consumer mindset is. Graphics don't have to be great (or even that good) but adequate. (Though Nvidia is trying to disprove this with its Ion platform.)

Though Nvidia's CEO is right when he says GPU technology is far ahead of integrated graphics (Intel's current style of graphics), he's not necessarily right when he says there's a massive mind share shift to an Nvidia-style GPU-centric universe.

Moreover, Intel continues to improve its integrated graphics and is readying a discrete Larrabee graphics processor, to boot. Kumar says that Intel may be more of a direct competitor with Nvidia in the future than AMD-ATI.

So, the question is probably better posed this way: Will the world's PC consumers in the future see the Nvidia model or the Intel model as the true core of the PC? You decide.

[stefanvolos]

I think you are over stating the importance of the netbook and overlooking the next step in the evolution of the PC. The home computer is quickly becoming a home entertainment center as more people stream music video, movies and television shows via broadband cable and FiOS. I expect that interactive gaming will undergo explosive growth in the next few years as well, and developers will want to take advantage of the latest and greatest GPU technology.

[deuceswyyld]

The answer really lies in the operating system architecture. When Snow Leopard is released, there will be a huge shift in how things are handled. GPUs will be doing more of the work that CPUs do now. The issue is not as hardware related as it is operating system dependent. If Windows 7 does not follow the same model Snow Leopard will, Intel has nothing to worry about (as long as Microsoft keeps their market share, that is).

[superswiss]

What are you talking about? Windows Vista is already offloading the entire GUI to the GPU. The shift has already started and it was started by Microsoft and not Apple. Apple is behind the curve. Just another misconception about Windows Vista. Aero barely uses any CPU. It's all done by the GPU. This is the reason why you need a decent video card if you want the eye candy on Vista.

[superswiss]

And here is another bit of info about Microsoft continue this trend. DirectX 11 will use the GPU for parallel processing. <br /> <br />http://gizmodo.com/5028013/microsoft-directx-11-to-use-gpu-for-parallel-processing

[random truth]

@superswiss<br />The windows gui is not already completely handled by the cpu, I find that kind of hard to believe, that has been a feature of mac os x since 2001. Also that is just using a gpu for its general job. Basically drawing images. OpenCL in Snow Leopard will allow it to be used for computation. Like a spreadsheet app could use the greater proccessing ability of the gpu to accelerate its equations. Or a video editing app could use the gpu to encode video, etc.

[superswiss]

@random truth <br />Google "Desktop Composition", "Desktop Windows Manager" and "OSX Quartz". DWM is the desktop composition engine in Vista and Quartz in OSX. Do some reading on both and you will quickly find out that Vista goes a lot further than Quartz. Quartz only offloads the computations for the pretty desktop effects onto the GPU such as the window and dock animations, but the GUI itself is rendered by the CPU. I'm talking about the actual computations needed to render a window, not just drawing the pixels. Yes, drawing the pixels always goes through the GPU, but first you need to actually render what you wanna draw on the screen. Vista on the other hand offloads the entire rendering task to the GPU, not just the pretty animations. Once DirectX 11 is shipped than every application will automatically take advantage of the GPU for most graphics and UI operations, because everything on Vista goes through DirectX. Not every problem is suitable for a GPU, though, but graphics, video editing, codecs etc. are natural fits because they are highly parallel problems by nature. All these will be the first to take more advantage of the GPU. Nvidia already has their PureVideo codecs for Windows that take full advantage of the GPU to decode video streams. I don't believe much of that is available on OS X, so Apple has to catch up quite a bit.

[random truth]

@superswiss<br />It may leap quartz, But what about quartz extreme with all its core image, core animation, core sound, and core video goodness. Then their is quartz 2d and quartz 2d extreme, which use the gpu for images, text, shadows, blurs, and antialiasing. So all of that seams to do the same thing as windows dmw. <br />P.S Am i the only one who thinks of drm when I see dmw, when they are completely unrelated?

[Clarious]

GPUs are very powerful, so you will wasted it power if you only use it for gaming or rendering 3D images. With CUDA, CTM or OpenCL, GPUs can have bigger role in the future: decoding HD video, image recognition etc... This is what Nvidia means.

[msjonker]

The GPU is only useful if code is executed there. More tasks need to specifically be offloaded to the GPU before consumers are going to start demanding better GPUs. Very few video codecs even take advantage of the GPU and that is the underlying problem for this big GPU shift.

[-Roddly]

I thing that hasn't been mentioned is WPF. Microsoft is moving away from WinForms into Windows Presentation Foundation in which all graphics for applications will be sent through Direct X and therefore handled by the GPU. All of it. Even the simplest portions of the UI will be offloaded from the CPU and processed by the GPU.

[contentcreator--2008]

Multicore programming is inherently harder. Code for many small GPU CPUs that can't do very much, and are hard (slow) to get to, is even harder, subject to many diminishing returns. Communications bandwidth eats up more time than might be saved. So GPUs are useful only for some homogeneous tasks. Show me firefox loading 1 web page while running on 10 cores with no core more than 30% of the task. I thought so. GPUs may help a lot for a few uses, but it's way premature to claim the CPU is dead.

[scottthesculptor]

jeez. <br />just put the GPU executable commands in the CPU. <br />even easier with multiple cores <br /> <br />remember when "math coprocessing units" used to be separate from the CPU? <br /> <br />code doesn't care *where* it's physically executed

[contentcreator--2008]

Methinks there's a reason you're a sculptor...

[Pointedly]

Nvidia's Huang is absolutely correct. By having developed technology that enables processing to be handled by GPUs, Nvidia has set a clear and sensible path for the future of PCs. However, although the technology is available today, it will be quite some time before it becomes mainstream. Cash-strapped corporations, educational institutions, and home users will continue to look mainly at PC price rather than at the overall and long-term cost of ownership. For anyone and everyone else who can afford to pay a bit more up front, a desktop PC with a high-end Nvidia graphics card and Nvidia's CUDA technology is the best (and often, in the long run, the least expensive) way to go. As technology progresses and costs come down, it is possible that in a few years Nvidia's technolgy will make it into those low-cost integrated graphics laptops and even cheaper netbooks. Even so, it is likely future separate-graphics-card desktop solutions from Nvidia will continue to blow the socks off integrated graphics systems...particularly if those systems continue to be CPU centric.

[applehazelnut]

GPUs are like IBM's PowerPC processors. They've been pushed out of the PC market. Why is there any reason to suspect nVidia will do any better? It's a RISCy business venture in my humble opinion. :)

[pithenumber]

***!?!<br />GPUs will not be pushed out of the market

[gmckibbe]

Just a note that 95%+ of users have no need for discrete GPU. <br />Web browsing, photo viewing, listening to/burning CDs &#38; even watching DVDs (read 2D images) derive little to NO BENEFIT from discrete graphics solutions. Integrated graphics are more than adequate, especially if considering latest generation chipsets. Dollar for dollar you are better off spending $ to upgrade your CPU than you are spending it on high end discrete graphics, unless you're focused on intense 3D applications like gaming and even then upgrading your Graphics without an upgraded CPU is quite literally a waste of money..key message is that CPU is absolutely relevant and that won't change any time in the near future.

[superswiss]

I beg to differ. You are forgetting that more and more users will be consuming Hi-Def video. Try watching a 1080p movie on Intel integrated graphics and then watch the same on a Nvidia or ATI video card. Let me know how it goes.

[deslock]

@superswiss <br />I get what your saying but Nvidia needs to expand their market desperately in this economy or everyone is going to start saying that their graphics are "good enough" and won't be willing to drop a $300 premium for an add-on card. You can guarantee that the next gen of Intel integrated will run HD with power to spare so Nvidia is at a crossroads. Stay niche gaming while Intel eats up their market slowly but surely or... <br /> <br />This is what this whole argument is about. Nvidia sees the potential for the same thing happening to graphics as what happened to Audio. Remember when we had sound cards? Now full 7.1 channel surround sound is found on the cheapest integrated chip motherboard. <br /> <br />Nvidia needs to convince developers NOW to start trusting more on the GPU so that "good enough" doesn't drive them into the grave. Hidef media isn't going to do it. They need applications, logic, computations, etc. to be moved to use the GPU. And they need to do it fast or it will be too late.

[Heebee Jeebies]

Jen-Hsun Huang may or may not be wrong. However, if he is right then he and all other video card makers have a big issue in front of them. That issue is the very poor quality drivers they keep releasing. Just look at the issues with the GPU support in Photoshop CS4. 99% of the problems are directly related to the video card drivers. If they want to rule the computer world per Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang then they had better do a lot better with the drivers.<br /><br />As for for Mr. Jen-Hsun Huang assertions. I think we will see the GPU being used more, but it will not replace the CPU. At best they are going to work together to make things better for us. But, one will not replace the other.<br /><br />Robert

[Aikuchi]

Hasn't Intel announced recently there going to invest 7 billion in the atomic 32-nanometer level. What are the current levels of GPU?

[pithenumber]

nVidia is at 55nm<br />ATi is at 55nm, but moving to 40nm in the first half of this year

[ctfoley]

in the big picture, purpose-built processors are replacing general-purpose processors. just like more graphics work on the pc is being done by graphics chips, netbooks and mobile internet devices like the iphone are running on ARM chips especially designed for mobile computing.

[OutOfBoxExperience]

Current Motherboards are all backwards<br /><br />A state of the art motherboard should be nothing more than a state of the art NVidia Graphics Card sharing a PCIe 16x Bus with an 800MB/sec SSD boot drive (Since any Graphics Heavy Lifting will not be required untill your OS boots up anyway)<br /><br />The Graphics card should have a socket for CPU and Ram and All current Motherboards should be Museum Curiosities or thrown into a dump and forgotten