Re: @Golcd Conversely though
@a non e-mouse,
"Intel are being squeezed. At one end, ARM is doing (very) low power for good enough performance. At the high end, GPUs are doing the heavy parallel number crunching. What's left for Intel? They're now looking to integrate FPGAs onto the CPU die. How many people will need that?"
You've forgotten Xeon Phi. This is a true monster of a chip. The next one is a true CPU, not a coprocessor. And it's got about the same grunt as Nvidia's best GPU.
Being a CPU it has a lot of advantages over Nvidia's GPU - you don't have to load data over a PCIe bus. That will mean it's peak performance is easier to sustain, so in real world applications it will probably be faster than a GPU.
And being just a bunch of X86 (well, more importantly, SSE. The x86 bit is largely irrelevant) cores it is a little easier to exploit.
It's not quite as elegant as the great, late and lamented Cell processor, but it'll do.
"Microsoft saw this coming. They spent loads on a smart phone OS, a billion advertising it, over a billion propping up Nokia and more buying out the burned out shell. All because Microsoft knew that being dominant on the desktop will be the equivalent of being the dominant supplier of abacuses next decade."
I don't think MS have seen the future at all. They nearly did, and 7 year's ago had an opportunity to start defining an ARM server architecture. They did mobile instead, and now Qualcomm, AMD, etc are leading the way in ARM servers with Windows Server utterly unprepared to exploit them. No wonder they're porting stuff to Linux, because that's faster than getting Windows Server running on ARM and getting all their server applications moved too.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
