Graphics processors will replace CPUs – Nvidia CEO

Article title is misleading, or shows a lack of understanding. He was talking specifically about certain server workloads. And I believe for such applications GPUs are already being widely used.

Desktop CPUs will remain for the foreseeable future. At best you have hybrid silicon like AMD's APUs which, while attractive value offerings, are not the best at CPU, nor GPU loads.

Not saying it will be like that forever of course. It is not wise to attempt to make sure predictions about the future of computing.
 
Moore’s Law was an observation made by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, which states the amount of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will double every 18 months.
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If the staff writer did a little more research is that moore's law has slowed down a fair bit, as for one die shrinkage can't happen indefinitely, perhaps with a new technology approach, in fact intel has already pointed out moore's law is now at about 2 and half years.

It's speculation is that it will moore's law would be dead by 2025, which remains to be seen.

@BandwidthAddict
Any proof to suggest otherwise, GPU's in general are miles ahead of CPU's......
 
BandwidthAddict said:
No they won't.
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Not entirely impossible. Obviously CPUs are better at single threaded computation, but should single threaded performance gains seriously slow down (even more than they already have), the abundance of potentially available parallel performance may require restructuring many applications to be parallel in order to see any performance benefit. This isn't possible with all loads, but for most, it probably is. When this happens GPUs could easily have a strong edge, possibly enough to make CPUs become the special purpose hardware.
 
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What a weird thing to say. They're both processors. If a "GPU" replaces a "CPU" it becomes a "CPU" not?
LOL
 
cguy said:
Not entirely impossible. Obviously CPUs are better at single threaded computation, but should single threaded performance gains seriously slow down (even more than they already have), the abundance of potentially available parallel performance may require restructuring many applications to be parallel in order to see any performance benefit. This isn't possible with all loads, but for most, it probably is. When this happens GPUs could easily have a strong edge, possibly enough to make CPUs become the special purpose hardware.
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I think we are many many years away from that switch..

For the moment I see GPU's replacing CPUs in servers for very specific types of workloads, but the CPU itself is not going anywhere anytime soon, even in machines that are heavily reliant on the GPU for the processing performance.
 
Sabre Wulf said:
What a weird thing to say. They're both processors. If a "GPU" replaces a "CPU" it becomes a "CPU" not?
LOL
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Would more than likely be called something like a PPU (Parallel Processing Unit) rather than a CPU...
 
ToxicBunny said:
Would more than likely be called something like a PPU (Parallel Processing Unit) rather than a CPU...
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It will still be a Central Processing unit. It is at the center of you PC after all.
 
Magnum said:
It will still be a Central Processing unit. It is at the center of you PC after all.
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Chance are you will need a CPU for booting and basic functions and the GPU/ppu for everything else

That will mean not a massive reenginering of current system
 
ToxicBunny said:
I think we are many many years away from that switch..

For the moment I see GPU's replacing CPUs in servers for very specific types of workloads, but the CPU itself is not going anywhere anytime soon, even in machines that are heavily reliant on the GPU for the processing performance.
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I don't think it would be anything that happens short term. The biggest inhibitor at this point being the size and type of the memory supported. GPUs already support virtual memory, on demand paging, context switching, etc. If there's nowhere to go but parallel, they're almost inevitable.

Edit: BTW, do you know that there are now bootable Xeon Phis? As a piece of hardware goes, this is somewhere between CPU (in terms of capability, but not single threaded performance) and GPU (performance generally somewhat worse).
 
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ToxicBunny said:
Would more than likely be called something like a PPU (Parallel Processing Unit) rather than a CPU...
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But would it still need a cpu to drive it? I reckon quantum computing will trump this before it takes.
 
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