[citation][nom]InvalidError[/nom]Even the most powerful GPU setup on Earth still suck at intrinsically serial tasks and writing single/lightly threaded stuff is much easier/faster/cheaper than writing proper multi-threaded code so desire for higher single-thread performance is going to be around for the foreseeable future, albeit as a secondary objective.[/citation]
i know that the gpu cant do everything, but thats my point, if what could be offloaded to it was, how much would that free up the cpu, how much more could we get out of it, and to that extent, how much would we still need even better cpu? i know its no where near what it was in the p4 and earlier days. hell if my computer isn't lying to me, my phenom II 955 black and amd radeon 5770 1gb can handle playback of 4k video.
what pushed me from a p2 to a p4 was partially a dvd player, and mostly mkv support (mp4 h.246, whatever) and what pushed me to a quad core was 720p video being unplayable half the time on my p4 and my motherboard died. but now i don't have that media push... image editors i use don't preform like a bag of... you can finish that thought. even video games that are developed for the pc can pull reasonable frame rates and are capped by my video card more than my cpu.
we hit an area where we no longer always could use or need a better cpu, and what use to drive cpu sales, rendering, can be offloaded to the gpu and get spit back out done faster almost any cpu could do it.
i see a stonger reliance on gpus, especially when opencl is widely adopted.