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Intel should buy Nvidia, drop their internal GPU efforts, and focus on regaining their CPU lead. It may be a futile effort, with the end of Moore's law and Den

Intel should buy Nvidia, drop their internal GPU efforts, and focus on regaining their CPU lead. It may be a futile effort, with the end of Moore's law and Dennard scaling making their previous approach less appealing, but they've got to try. Then again, if they bought Nvidia, they'd probably try to put an x86 inside the GPU...

speedplane 8y ago
> Intel should ... focus on regaining their CPU lead. I think they are focused on that. They've been trying to bring their 10nm process to market for years. It's now 3 years past their initial projections. Moore's exponential curve is certainly dead, the big question now is whether performance will improve linearly or something worse.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Performance can still increase exponentially on average. There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing, such as chemical, biological (bacterial), DNA-based, optical, maybe quantum... and of course we would start replacing silicon with graphene once its production finally takes off, which should lead to 3D chips. Spintronics is another very interesting field.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing ... Agreed, but none of the technologies have reached the marketplace, and it's entirely unclear how long it will take for them to develop. If it takes decades, any exponential curve is toast.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      That is not true. You can't claim that. I'm saying that on average it's going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years, the jump will be so huge it'll be an exponentially large step.
      - speedplane 8y ago
        > on average it's going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years, the jump will be so huge it'll be an exponentially large step I would not call that an exponential, it's a step function. It's entirely possible that human innovation over time will be look more like a series of step functions than a continuous exponential. The problem with step functions, of course, is that you can't easily predict future growth based on past growth, as you can with an exponential. E.g., when quantum computing comes, it will surely be significant, but if it takes 10, 100, or 1000 years to make a breakthrough, it's not at all clear that the timing will happen to coincide with the exponential that we have been on for the last 50 years.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 8y ago
I sat at Intel's presentation about Larrabee during GDCE 2009. Also enjoyed how their OpenGL drivers used to lie about hardware support and how in used to talk about being open source friendly, yet GPA analyser was DirectX only for several years. NVidia has nothing to gain by becoming part of Intel.
- 01100011 8y ago
  > NVidia has nothing to gain by becoming part of Intel. Who said they did? I'm saying Intel could gain by acquiring Nvidia and focusing their engineers on CPUs and chipsets.

speedplane 8y ago

> Intel should ... focus on regaining their CPU lead. I think they are focused on that. They've been trying to bring their 10nm process to market for years. It's now 3 years past their initial projections. Moore's exponential curve is certainly dead, the big question now is whether performance will improve linearly or something worse.

TomMarius 8y ago
Performance can still increase exponentially on average. There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing, such as chemical, biological (bacterial), DNA-based, optical, maybe quantum... and of course we would start replacing silicon with graphene once its production finally takes off, which should lead to 3D chips. Spintronics is another very interesting field.
- speedplane 8y ago
  > There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing ... Agreed, but none of the technologies have reached the marketplace, and it's entirely unclear how long it will take for them to develop. If it takes decades, any exponential curve is toast.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    That is not true. You can't claim that. I'm saying that on average it's going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years, the jump will be so huge it'll be an exponentially large step.
    - speedplane 8y ago
      > on average it's going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years, the jump will be so huge it'll be an exponentially large step I would not call that an exponential, it's a step function. It's entirely possible that human innovation over time will be look more like a series of step functions than a continuous exponential. The problem with step functions, of course, is that you can't easily predict future growth based on past growth, as you can with an exponential. E.g., when quantum computing comes, it will surely be significant, but if it takes 10, 100, or 1000 years to make a breakthrough, it's not at all clear that the timing will happen to coincide with the exponential that we have been on for the last 50 years.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

pjmlp 8y ago

I sat at Intel's presentation about Larrabee during GDCE 2009. Also enjoyed how their OpenGL drivers used to lie about hardware support and how in used to talk about being open source friendly, yet GPA analyser was DirectX only for several years. NVidia has nothing to gain by becoming part of Intel.

01100011 8y ago
> NVidia has nothing to gain by becoming part of Intel. Who said they did? I'm saying Intel could gain by acquiring Nvidia and focusing their engineers on CPUs and chipsets.