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B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Pretty Cool Name posted:

We do I want a lovely graphics processor built into my CPU?

Fake edit: Other than to throw extra money at Intel for no reason.

lovely? As the OP said, this will seriously put a dent in the low-mid end graphics card sales. There'll always be the X-treme gamer bunch that will pay $400+ to have the fastest GPU hot off the assembly line, but for 90% of computer users, a dedicated graphics card is just one more thing to worry about breaking/compatibility issues.

The minimal Windows 7 graphical eye-candy doesn't require much, and the 3D GUI revolution has yet to (ever) take a real hold. The fact that browsers are only just beginning to take advantage of the GPU for page rendering shows just how little super fast GPUs matter to most.

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B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Factory Factory posted:

Will we never again feel the thrill of a desktop or laptop upgrade with a significant boost in capability? Are we doomed forever to only get our "new toy" excitement when Apple releases their version of a previously unpopular product and revitalizes that market?

:smith:

Got SSD?

The newest ones are *significantly* faster than even the best spinning platter drives, and will make your computer feel like a different machine all together. Once these start getting cheap enough to become the default (non-media) drives, we'll probably see all kinds of cool built in RAID/optimized to hell craziness.

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

Assuming Dell starts offering on-board video with dual-display outputs on the next gen of Optiplexes, this will probably get us to drop add-in video cards for everything except Autodesk product users.

That really seems to be the main design goal. Much better solution than some lovely OB graphics processor or cheapo drop-in card that isn't good for games anyway.

I do see the concern that it might stifle GPU development to a degree. Personally, I see a future where computers are based around 2 separate main chips. One that is blazingly fast at serial, or not quite parallel tasks, and one that can handle those (comparably) rare scenarios that benefit from massive, fully-independent parallelization. The existence of GPGPU proves that there is a need, but until s/w starts to take advantage of massive parallelization for things other than, well, graphics/physics, there won't be much movement

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

ilkhan posted:

As to new socket, if 5% of consumer upgraded their CPU I'd be amazed, if *1%* have ever upgraded their CPU without a mobo swap I'd also be amazed. I certainly have never done a CPU upgrade without a new mobo. Its a non-issue. The only people who care are us enthusiasts and we can sell our old boards WITH the CPU, so its *still* not a big deal.

The whole 939 crap was what turned me off from the idea of buying quality, discrete components with the hope of future upgrades. When my NB fan died on a perfectly good Ath64X2 system, I tried to find a replacement mobo, but I couldn't even find a used one on ebay for <$150. Seemed pointless when I was able to pick up a whole q9450 HP system for $600.

Just package them together (like the Atom boards) with a known-decent sink and fan and be done with it.

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