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GPUs yield a higher core density and are more efficient in certain situations. This appears to be where the arms race is in HPC these days. Every cpu maker is trying to be the first to cross the finish line with a general purpose GPU solution these days(with a traditional CPU strapped to it's back to run the os). Rumor has it that nvidia will have an arm platform soon. I'm sure Intel and AMD are afraid of this. They want to have something in the pipeline that is competitive before this happens. The way the market is going these days, consumer devices will soon almost all be based around low power/small footprint solutions(e.g. atom, mobile, arm). Heck, it probably won't be too long before we start seeing some serious SOC solutions(what could a raspberry pi type device do in 2 years with a 4 or 6 core arm at it's core). So, that kills margins on the consumer market more or less. Or, well, at least it becomes a race to the bottom. What's left is enterprise and "the cloud", where efficiency and iops still rule. For these companies, CPU speed isn't a bottleneck, it's mostly core and io density. They simply want to run more jobs in a smaller space, not necessarily run the jobs faster. So engineering teams are starting to look very closely at GPUs as a means to get a huge improvement in core density for certain situations at the cost of having to rethink some of the software stack. Putting the GPU on the same die as the CPU makes a lot of sense from this perspective. It'll be interesting to watch. If nvidia does have an arm platform in the works, they may win this race, though intel does have a huge advantage with being able to run multiple foundries at one. Part of me wants to believe that intel is capable of doing much more with their APU solutions, but are simply waiting until the future of the market is clearer. Once that happens, they may be able to beat everyone else simply by timing the market on newer designs(like how intel beat AMD after screwing up with itanium and P4). Note: Having a low power SOC type solution is another side effect of all this, but I don't think that's the primary motivator for Intel's efforts here. Maybe for the atoms, but not this chip. |