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In the old days gamers paid extra for sound cards etc., all these multimedia addons gradually got commoditised. I don't think it would've been a completely craz

• wmf 2y ago
  There were even rumors about "IGP is all you need" and Intel "canceling" Nvidia by eliminating PCIe so there would be nowhere to attach a discrete GPU. (Intel did cancel nForce.) In retrospect that was completely ridiculous.
  • MBCook 2y ago
    The big problem for them is AMD. Anytime they do something stupid (Itanium) they have a competitor right there to take advantage of it. Same problem IBM had. They didn’t like people using “their“ PC architecture, so they decided to make the MCA bus and other proprietary stuff. Force everyone to do what they want. IBM‘s AMD was Compaq and all the clone makers. They all got together and used their power to prevent the market from being screwed up by IBM. I could really see Intel wanting to make that kind of move but it never would’ve worked in reality.
    • Tteriffic 2y ago
      Itanium was not stupid. Some genuine effort behind it could have changed this whole story.
      • markhahn 2y ago
        I'm curious why you think there was not effort behind ia64. I still think ia64 was sunk by the let-the-compiler-do-it tarpit. There were ambivalent aspects such as, at the time, questions of power or chip area. But things like memory latency are just not predictable enough to do strictly in-order pipelines. OoO won.
        • pjmlp 2y ago
          Not the OP, but share a similar point of view. Had AMD not been around with AMD64, the industry would have had to get it working no matter what, HP and Microsoft were already on the Itanium train, and if production of x86 got slowly replaced by Itanium that was it, Windows and HP-UX would drag the ecosystems into it, and eventually the remaining issues would be sorted out.
          • rwmj 2y ago
            Wouldn't the world have jumped to Alpha instead? If you're going to switch the entire architecture, might as well switch to one which is sane.
            • pjmlp 2y ago
              Windows on Alpha didn't went far, so I guess no. UNIX systems, I also doubt, as we were still in the days each vendor had their own CPUs.
            • ghaff 2y ago
              No. HP was behind Itanium. In fact, it was basically their idea in the first place. I'm still not entirely sure why Intel went along although I suspect at least some of it was getting away from various x86 cross-licensing agreements.
            • wmf 2y ago
              Intel bought Alpha and killed it to eliminate the competition.
              • ghaff 2y ago
                HP bought DEC by way of Compaq. Some DEC Alpha assets ended up with Intel (e.g. Hudson MA). But your statement doesn't make sense in general.
          • twoodfin 2y ago
            My issue with this alternative history is Intel’s consumer roadmap for Itanium, or rather its complete lack of one. AFAICT, they expected Itanium to own the high end server/HPC market, while 32-bit x86 would continue supporting PC’s for another decade. That seems remarkably short-sighted in retrospect.
• MBCook 2y ago
  Maybe early (say 94-99?). To some degree that happened. Most computers using an integrated GPU at this point, it’s mostly gamers or people who really need the power that have one on an expansion card. Of course it’s not actually the CPU doing the work, it’s just in the same package. Part of the difference is that audio can only get so good. But graphics don’t have much of a limit yet. We kept adding more colors and higher resolutions and higher refresh rates, more polygons, and even a second display for true 3-D. It’s the true embarrassingly parallel problem we’re throwing more silicon at it just keeps making it better. By the time Intel decided to get “serious“ and develop Larrabee, they clearly saw the market was there and would keep growing otherwise they wouldn’t have even bothered. And honestly, whether it was on the same package as the CPU or an actual part of it the way normal vector units or the branch predictor are, who would benefit more from having a good graphics story to go on their GPU than the king of CPUs. They could use their advantages to just further cement their moat.
  • ndiddy 2y ago
    IMO the main reason why dedicated audio cards aren't a thing anymore is that Microsoft killed hardware accelerated audio as part of their driver API changes in Vista. The result is that games today have worse spatial audio than games that came out 20 years ago. If Microsoft hadn't done that, I think audio cards would have been in the same position as video cards where most users have their needs met by integrated solutions and gamers/high end users get dedicated cards (of course dedicated audio cards would have been more of a niche than GPUs).
    • omcnoe 2y ago
      Yeah there were old dedicated sound cards with support for spatial audio, and they were killed. But CPU's also just got really really fast in the meantime. You don't need dedicated hardware for spatial audio processing, it's cheaper and easier to do in software.
      • wtallis 2y ago
        There have been enough attempts post-Vista to do spatial audio on GPUs that I don't think the argument that CPUs were fast enough really holds water. I think it's mainly that spatial audio hasn't been a must-have feature, so omitting it or half-assing it hasn't been a problem.