If you look at computing history, you'll find many parallels over the years. For example the Floating Point Unit started out as a co-processor, this massive un

If you look at computing history, you'll find many parallels over the years. For example the Floating Point Unit started out as a co-processor, this massive unit you put next to your mainframe and plugged in. Over several iterations it went from external, to part of the same chasis, then on to an expansion card, before eventually making its way on-die, until by the time the first Pentium came out, the thought of having a CPU without an FPU was preposterous (I remember kicking myself for having bought the 486sx 25 instead of the 486dx 25 that had the integrated FPU.) We've seen a similar thing with GPUs. The original 3DFX was this card you had to use a loopthrough video connector with because it had no 2D capabilities. Slowly it got integrated with 2D capabilities, and then grew to be GPUs, before starting to transition onto the motherboard, before eventually making its way into Intel chips. I don't believe you can buy an i or Xeon series Intel chip these days that doesn't have a GPU integrated in it. It's not the most powerful thing, but it is usable via OpenCL. Intel currently has something called the Massive Integrated Core Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi) which has some really interesting technical advantages over the popular GPU approach. This started out as a separate expansion card you plugged into a PCI Express slot, but with the Knights Landing iteration due this year, it's also going to be available as an on-motherboard chip, and even support running the OS itself. (http://www.zdnet.com/article/intels-next-big-thing-knights-landing/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/intels-next-big-thing-knights-l... http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013/11/19/intel-brings-supercomputing-horsepower-to-big-data-analytics http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2013...)