Imho if cpu manufacturers figure out how to slap a large cache on the same die (something like amd 3D V-Cache but much more) we may actually see graphic cards become obsolete in favor of software rendering.
Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon.
It is true that a chip like this probably could render pretty decent 3d in software though. I wonder if combining this with the GPU in a clever way could allow more people to experience real time raytracing?
> Specialized silicon will always beat general purpose silicon.
The whole history of PCs is repeatedly proving otherwise. The NES had hardware sprites. Then Carmack & Romero showed up and proved you can have smooth side scrolling in software, on an underpowered CPU. The whole concept of a PPU was thus rendered obsolete. Repeat for discrete FPUs, discrete sound cards, RAID cards (ZFS), and so on.
Specialised silicon will beat general purpose silicon at the given task, until general purpose silicon + software catches up. You need to keep pouring in proportional R&D effort for the specialised silicon to stay ahead.
What keeps GPUs relevant is that they're in fact much more general than what the "G" originally stood for.
CPU’s have integrated a lot of specialized silicon as transistor budgets increased. x86 treats integer and floating point arithmetic as separate things because the math coprocessor used to be a separate and optional chip. Now days it’s GPU cores making the migration, but that’s hardly going to be the end of it.
When the second generation of EPYC came out, linus ran a "software rendered" version of crysis that did all rendering on CPU cores instead of GPU shader units. At 640x480 it ran alright.
Possibly - there are a lot of ray tracing algoeithms that don't really work well on GPUs (anything MCMC, for instance). But context and time aware denoising seems to be able to compensate.
It is true that a chip like this probably could render pretty decent 3d in software though. I wonder if combining this with the GPU in a clever way could allow more people to experience real time raytracing?