Multimedia Processor??

[saphalline]

I read the NVidia article in Wired recently ("The Next Intel" by Jeffrey M. O'Brien, pp. 100-103), and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talks more about the supposed "multimedia processor". A processor that performs all processing tasks for a PC - basic calculations, floating point, graphics, and sound all rolled into one processor.

Although it may be a bit of marketing glitz and overconfidence, he makes some good, tho not entirely convincing, points about the subject. He states that graphics processors are most likely to take over because of their large transistor count (1.5 to 2 times as many as the latest CPU), better efficiency (I've seen nothing on this subject either way), and their demand for pushing multimedia instead of clock cycles (ok I agree with this one).

The last one is a very good point because of course the latest games always benefit from the latest graphics cards, far more so than the latest MS Office version benefits from the latest Pentium. And what sort of benchmarks are run on PC's today? Sysmark 2001, Internet Content Creation, SiSoft Sandra, and games. And of course there's always the case of bringing up the gaming console systems which use a central processing "engine" with various specialized regions for graphics, computation, and sound.

And yet, I'm not quite ready to buy into the whole "multimedia processor" buzz. At least not for the foreseeable future. The biggest roadblock in my opinion is sheer core size. Can you imagine the transistor count on a processor that handles CPU, GPU, and sound processing tasks? How would you cool it? How would its clock speed be decided? How would you get all the necessary data into and out of it? Would the graphics section have its own onboard memory like real graphics cards do, or would it share a type of L2 cache with the CPU part? And what about upgrading? Unless countless versions were made, you could never approach the level of customization that separate CPU's, graphics cards, and sound cards provide!

I personally don't see how practical it would be to merge CPU, graphics, and sound into one processor, but maybe someday. What do you think?

[Anubis]

I don't think you'll be able to do it in say the next 3 years. Personally I wouldn't want everything together in one hunk o junk. Everyone is trying to come with all-in-one concepts and frankly its for the birds. If my sound card goes bad, I get a new one. If my video card goes bad, I get a new one. If my proc goes bad, I get a new one. Now if they combine all of these into one chip your SOL. You also raised several other points on the problems that will have to be overcome. If this does happen this will change the mobo as we know it, maybe for the better though as with reduced components the mobo becomes a less likely point of failure. The only people I really see using and doing well with somethin like this are the game console makers. Hell, the darn things might as well be computers at this stage anyways.

[saphalline]

I don't think it will be a recent event, either. As to one of the parts going bad, well that might not be so bad if the multimedia chip ever gets made. I mean, if processors keep getting better like this, we'll eventually reach the point where they provide even more extra power than they do today at even lower prices. It could end up being a commodity. And if say, the sound section goes bad, wouldn't that mean the whole thing is bad and you'd just an exchange? I don't know, just thinking...

I do see a lot of technical benefits to having it all on one chip, but just as many losses, and I don't know which are more important. Maybe someday.