Amiga on a Chip (AMD CPU predictions)

[ElPolloDiabl]

Check out the article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/core-bulldozer-gulftown-phenom-athlon,11475.html

He says instead getting up to even more cores, specialized functions will be put on the CPU.

[Heiroglyph]

It's a circular progression, CPU only, CPU + coprocessors, CPU only and back to CPU + coprocessors.

Look at how we've gone from serial communication to parallel and back to serial.  

At some point, we'll max out serial again and have to gang them together into parallel.

[ferrellsl]

Nothing new or profound in the article.  Intel, AMD and Nvidia have been saying the same things for years.  Apple even has the A4 which is an integrated CPU/GPU on the market and the other smartphone makers have similar offerings.  Intel has SandyBridge and AMD has its "Fusion" line of CPU/GPU SOCs.

[LoadWB]

It's a circular progression, CPU only, CPU + coprocessors, CPU only and back to CPU + coprocessors.

Look at how we've gone from serial communication to parallel and back to serial.  

At some point, we'll max out serial again and have to gang them together into parallel.

What??  Multiple parallel serial lines in serial?  You, sir, will destroy the universe!

[Fats]

At some point, we'll max out serial again and have to gang them together into parallel.

You mean PCI-express x4 x8 and x16 ? The old style parallel communication where all parallel paths have to be in sync with one clock are out and I don't think they will ever come back.
Going to discrete components will only be able to be done if the I/O bottleneck in some way can be solved. Currently the internal speed of a CPU is too big compared to bandwidth and latency of external IO making putting everything on one chip cost effective. Currently no solutions are in sight for this fact.

greets,
Staf.