The History of CPU’s and GPU’s
Have you ever thought of a day when only a CPU or GPU controlled the whole system, and the other option was not there anymore? Recently, I have. It’s Icarus here again, and I’m just going to start this out by talking about the two: CPU’s and GPU’s.
This thought came to mind when I was thinking about the recent court case between Intel and NVidia, fighting over licensing rights for developing chipsets that supported the Core i7 Nehalem processors. Intel is the processor powerhouse, and NVidia is a large GPU competitor against ATI.
Now, years and years ago, when computers were still at lower levels, and Intel was competing against stronghold AMD with its new Pentium processors, not much was integrated; memory controllers were in a separate location on the motherboard, memory was still controlled via the memory controller, there was only DDR memory, and the GPU was at its separate location, receiving commands from the CPU. Initially, a computer could not work without a CPU or a GPU; the computer had to have both. You’d definitely need a CPU to send commands to other components through the motherboard for the computer to even function, and you’d need a GPU to have a display to look at.
As developers and manufacturers created new and better computer hardware at an alarming rate, things started to become integrated; AMD went on to be the first to include the on-die memory controller in its CPU’s, NVidia was established and began to create its own GPU’s, Intel began the development of the Core2 series, and motherboard chipsets became more and more advanced for CPUs to be able to process and send commands and data to components of the computers more quickly. CPU’s and GPU’s developed at a neck-to-neck rate, and both were progressively becoming much more powerful and efficient.
And now, here we are today, with the Core i7 Nehalmen processors, ATI’s popular 4870 X2 and NVidia’s GTX 295 GPU’s, one with 2 GPU’s on one graphics card and the latter with one powerful GPU. Intel now includes its on-die memory controller in the CPU itself, and now there’re motherboards with integrated GPU’s powerful enough to produce a good display on monitors. Everything is becoming INTEGRATED.
So, what’s next on the menu? Well, I’m going to talk about the hypothetical situations I thought of when either the CPU or GPU completely takes control of a computer, meaning that one can live without the other(CPU won’t even need on-board integrated GPU).
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Well, that’s all I got for tonight! See you all later! Come back tomorrow!
~| Icarus
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Why Upgrade to a High-End NVidia or ATI Graphics Card?
Hey guys, Icarus here. While I was looking around, reading up on articles about recent developments in computer hardware, and I thought of a particular topic: graphics cards.
We all love graphics cards because they make our screens much prettier; if we buy better graphics cards, we can use it on larger monitors to play our games and watch our movies. We also get bragging rights for getting the highest 3DMark score amongst our group of friends. But does this really matter?
Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in the connection between the graphics card industry and the computer gaming industry: graphics cards develop at a much faster pace than the computer games do. You see, constantly, graphics card manufacturers releasing newer and better graphics cards, adding 50 or 100 or even 1000 to their previous number(hahaha…). And yes, game companies do release brand new games each year, good and bad, high-end and low-end graphics, intense and boring plot lines.
All that is good, except the part where I mentioned before: the graphics card industry is developing at a much faster pace. I mean, if you look at some of the benchmarks for the high-end graphics cards, they churn out FPS(frames per second) so much higher than 40 FPS that it doesn’t really matter how much more you’re getting over 40. Once you get more than 40FPS, the human eye can’t really distinguish between 50FPS and 60FPS. So what’s the point of buying a high-end NVidia or ATI graphics card if a lower graphics card can get the job done just fine?
If you’re thinking about upgrading right now, I don’t really think it’s the time. Let’s say you have a 9800GTX, a good graphics card now-a-days at a good price. That card can take on most games well, and if you’re thinking about upgrading just so it feels good, I wouldn’t do that. Even if it’s for playing higher-end games(Crysis comes up at the top of my head), I still wouldn’t do it. You can always lower the quality just a bit, and play it at a playable FPS. And in the economic situation we are all in right now, I think that’s more than enough.
Well, that’s all I got for now. Stay tuned for more articles! Which means… subscribe! I”m going to be writing something new every single day!
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See you all later(in my blog!)!! Good night!!
~| Icarus
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