AMD did add that eventually, in a matter of 3 – 5 years, most floating point workloads would be moved off of the CPU and onto the GPU. At that point you could even argue against including any sort of FP logic on the “CPU” at all. It’s clear that AMD’s design direction with Bulldozer is to prepare for that future.

AnandTech: AMD Core Counts and Bulldozer: Preparing for an APU World

This seems like a reasonable approach for a server or workstation, but would be downright horrible for any kind of gaming, IMO.  Also seems to go against the trend that Intel is following which is to eventually have enough x86 cores to remove the need for a GPU entirely.

Of course, AMD owns a real GPU product and Intel, so far doesn’t.  So it makes sense for them to play off their strengths.

It will be interesting to see where this goes over the next 5 years or so.

Nov 30, 2009