Linus Torvalds: Discrete GPUs are going away

[redzo]

Out of interest what price do you think is sustainable for the dGPU market?

As integrated solutions eat up the low to middle end the high end dGPUs won't stay the same price. They will have to make up those lost profits from the low and middle end.

That increased pricing is going to further erode the market for dGPUs exacerbating the problem.

I do not know. Hard to tell( need more data ). I guess it depends of how(AMD or nVidia) much profit do you get from low to middle market. If that is where the true profit lays, then I think that the dGPU is screwed and it will become a niche product and your scenario makes a lot more sense. On the other way around, I do not see why the 2 most important players cannot adapt to better profit from middle to high as long as there is a clear demand for this products. The performance difference between middle/high-end and APU is huge, they just have to play their cards right.

 

[ShintaiDK]

woosh?

4 years ago, people said iGPU is going to obsolete dGPU. They claim the same argument as you, that soon iGPU will be powerful enough to compare to equivalent mid-range dGPU and thus, there will be longer a need for it.

Except, the equivalent mid-range dGPU always increases.

5 years from now, APUs & Intel CPU will probably match a GTX760 or R280 class performance. Would it suddenly be powerful enough to obsolete dGPU? Nope. 5 years from now, mid-range would be much much more powerful and 4K will be the norm, at which point a 760 or R280 class APU still won't be able to handle it.

What about further out, 10 years from now? Same thing applies. 8K may start to come on board or even VR. Your APU with its TitanZ class performance wouldn't be enough for real PC gamers.

20 years from now.. what's the difference exactly? You don't get that gamers demand more and game devs will keep on making more and more demanding games, display tech keeps pushing more pixels etc etc. We'll get to a point where there's entire holodecks like on Star Trek. Guess what? A discrete would still be faster.

The whole idea of iGPU replacing low end is true, sure, but the new dGPU low end is still faster than iGPU. When next gen iGPU comes and matches the current low-end, a new low end is created. Nothing has changed, only the pricepoint for superior performance.

Which comes back to my point, as long as there are people who are willing to pay top money for the best performance, discrete GPU will always hold a huge advantage and won't be obsolete.

How did dGPU marketshare and shipment go the last 4 years? In Q1 2010 something like 19 million dGPUs was shipped. In Q1 2014 that was below 14 million.

Its a simple numbers game. When volume is too small, then there wont be anything. Then it doesnt matter how fast a dGPU is over IGP. The dGPU is dead. Its just a question of when.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

As long as dGPUs keep the performance lead and there's gamers who really want a lot of graphics processing power to make games look pretty then people will continue to dump money into them and they'll be a viable business model.

dGPUs have never been "for the masses", the PC gaming space is very niche and for enthusiasts, it might be that most consumers (casuals) will flood to the tablet market and survive off slow iGPUs but who cares about them, they can stick to their 8 year console life cycle and locked in proprietary consoles/tablets, the people who really want quality will always go for quality and they'll pay through their nose to get it.

It's like saying that 5 star restaurants are going to go away because McDonalds are so much more efficient and appeal to the lowest common denominator, sure they serve billions of people, but people who are looking for a really decent quality dining experience are going to pay a lot to go somewhere nice and get a good meal.

I've also said this before, but the consoles piggyback off the success of the PC, it's a fundamentally parasitic relationship, they have hardware cycles of 6-8 years but in a relative sense they put next to nothing into R&D for those years, they simply let the PC gamers field the costs by continuing to buy and finance the aggressive cycle of PC graphics hardware every 18-24 months. Then 8 years later simply take something mid-end and tweak it a bit for their needs. So if the aggressive lifecycle of GPUs goes away then consoles are going to suffer immensely, their business model of being cheap and going into every living room will simply vanish, or be changed beyond recognition.

The dGPU market may shrink, but it's not going to go away as long as PC gamers want to power the next greatest thing, currently in a lot of computing hardware is now a solved problem, modern work/home desktops and laptops have way more power than they need but in the gaming space it's still a rat race to achieve that extra performance.

iGPUs are getting better but not a rate that's fast enough to let them close the gap between what we have now and dGPUs. I think Linus is basically talking rubbish here, but I guess time will tell.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

How did dGPU marketshare and shipment go the last 4 years? In Q1 2010 something like 19 million dGPUs was shipped. In Q1 2014 that was below 14 million.

It has little to do with dGPUs specifically and quite a lot to do with PC component sales declining in general, due to various reasons. If you want to play the numbers game, do it honestly.

 

[seitur]

APUs, Iris, Denver, etc., on-package RAM...they're all planning for that eventual reality. Except for the people with 4 cards in their PCs today, the rest of us won't care when it starts to happen.

4 x APU boards

 

[Silverforce11]

How did dGPU marketshare and shipment go the last 4 years? In Q1 2010 something like 19 million dGPUs was shipped. In Q1 2014 that was below 14 million.

Its a simple numbers game. When volume is too small, then there wont be anything. Then it doesnt matter how fast a dGPU is over IGP. The dGPU is dead. Its just a question of when.

Volume is irrelevant, did you look at revenue and profit?? That's the final factor.

Its doing great even with all the assault from mobiles, tablets, ultrabooks etc.

 

[Arkadrel]

How did dGPU marketshare and shipment go the last 4 years? In Q1 2010 something like 19 million dGPUs was shipped. In Q1 2014 that was below 14 million.

Its a simple numbers game. When volume is too small, then there wont be anything. Then it doesnt matter how fast a dGPU is over IGP. The dGPU is dead. Its just a question of when.

^ I agree.

I bet stock holders are paying close attention to the first iteration of "HBM / HMC" memory does to iGPUs & Discrete cards sales.

I can see iGPU eventually killing off Discretes via makeing them unprofitable (due to R&D + profits from a shunk market).

The problem for iGPUs has always been;
1) memory bandwidth (huge issue)
2) heat of makeing a big product like that (not as much a issue)

1) is fixed by HBM (amd) or HMCs (intel).
2) is fixed by selling the CPU with a closed watercooling kit.


The question is when will AMD or Intel have the balls to make a 150-200w APU (with HBM / HMC), and sell it with a Water Cooler heatsink.

I believe that will be the start of the end, for discretes.

 

[raghu78]

I agree with Linus in principle. But it will take time for this to happen. The problem with IGP or APUs today is the bandwidth bottleneck. Also future generations will see the vast majority of transistors go to the GPU. I don't see the CPU going above 4 cores for the mainstream APU. AMD will have to improve their big cores and provide 4 of them in a APU to satisfy the CPU needs for the vast majority of consumers. By 2015 AMD will transition to HBM across GPUs and APUs. Nvidia will follow in 2016 for their dGPUs and mobile SOCs like Tegra. The APU will make the entry level dGPU obsolete. Nowadays there are 4-5 chips from Nvidia and AMD. GK110, GK104, GK106, GK107 and Tahiti, Hawaii, Pitcairn, Bonaire, Oland.

In future only 3 chips will be made -
ultra high end ($500 - $650), 250w, 400+ sq mm
high end ($250 - $350), 175w , 250- 300 sq mm
mid range ($150 -$200), 100w, 160 - 200 sq mm.

The entry level dGPU with 100 - 120 sq mm will not make any sense against APUs with HBM and similar sp counts when they sport better architectural integration, unified address space and better perf/watt.

In notebooks the trend will be exacerbated as there are only 2 chips left for notebook dGPUs as Nvidia and AMD don't scale their 400+ sq mm / 250 watt ultra high end GPUs to notebooks. So starting from 2015 the trend will pick up speed and by 2020 the dGPU market would be a niche market.

From a software programming point of view too changes will happen to exploit the architectural simplicity/elegance and power of APUs. This too will accelerate the shrinking of dGPUs to a niche market.

 

[Arkadrel]

In notebooks the trend will be exacerbated as there are only 2 chips left for notebook dGPUs as Nvidia and AMD don't scale their 400+ sq mm / 250 watt ultra high end GPUs to notebooks. So starting from 2015 the trend will pick up speed and by 2020 the dGPU market would be a niche market.

Yep tablets + Laptops will be the first to lose discrete cards.

Its where powerfull iGPUs (compaired to mobile discretes) makes the most sense.

5 years from now there could be no more mobile discrete GPUs for laptops/tablets.

 

[ShintaiDK]

^ I agree.

I bet stock holders are paying close attention to the first iteration of "HBM / HMC" memory does to iGPUs & Discrete cards sales.

I can see iGPU eventually killing off Discretes via makeing them unprofitable (due to R&D + profits from a shunk market).

The problem for iGPUs has always been;
1) memory bandwidth (huge issue)
2) heat of makeing a big product like that (not as much a issue)

1) is fixed by HBM (amd) or HMCs (intel).
2) is fixed by selling the CPU with a closed watercooling kit.


The question is when will AMD or Intel have the balls to make a 150-200w APU (with HBM / HMC), and sell it with a Water Cooler heatsink.

I believe that will be the start of the end, for discretes.

You forgot one thing. The IC design cost for node shrinks.

We still have to see who goes 20nm and who doesnt. Broadcom gave up on 20nm due to cost. However we know Samsung, Apple, MediaTek(Big gamble) and Qualcomm are in the game. The rest however is still an unknown factor.

Its interesting to see what calculations AMD and nVidia got for 20nm. And what they expect for beyond, if any products at all.

 

[Qwertilot]

I'd have thought that 100w dGPUs would well within range for iGPUs once bandwidth is sorted?

For most people you can already get all the performance you sensibly need from Intel's 35/45w stuff, and that power draw requirement on the CPU side is only going to decrease over time.

So if you're happy going iGPU dominated, you could do it in a <150w chip with ~100w of iGPU. That's a lot of heat to cool of course, but all in one place and some very chunky heat sinks out there

Once you get up to high end of course, people will be after CPUs as quick as can be had too, so a rather insanely massive overall power draw.

 

[TeknoBug]

I have to agree, and companies like Ubisoft are intentionally gimping PC version of their games to not fully take advantage of dGPU's. Pretty soon Intel's will have a strong enough Intel HD graphics iGPU and AMD's will improve upon their's with the APU's (if AMD is still in the game down the road). And dGPU will still be around for those who want to run 4K resolutions.

@xpea, the PS4's is strong enough to do 1080p, there's a few games that runs 1080p right now and Planetside 2 is supposed to be 60fps 1080p (but how much graphics is enabled I'm not sure).

 

[Atreidin]

Linus just calls things the way he sees it without sugar-coating it, which is a great trait to have when dealing with a bunch of know-it-all primadonnas who would rather drag a project down with their crappy code than admit they are wrong. He's also a very smart guy and people tend to over-analyze his statements to reinforce whatever notion they already had about him.

There will always be people who want more power, and just based on thermal dissipation problems alone, offloading some work away from the CPU/IGP/APU will make it easier to ramp up the power. However people who want it are going to have to pay more and more for it, based on the fact the low-end dGPU cash generation is being eaten away. That's not even considering the changing costs of producing designs on newer processes. These market dynamics don't favor a lot of competitors, hence why we only have two major competitors right now.

My guess is that the more integrated graphics becomes acceptable, the more expensive mid- and high-end stuff will become. I don't know if recent huge price increases for high-end cards are indicative of this or not, but I think the cost floor for dGPUs will rise faster than inflation. Maybe for professional users who work at companies where money is no object the discrete GPU will last longer.

Will the enthusiasts and big spenders in the future be profitable enough to bother with? I suppose Linus would tend to doubt that prospect. I don't see any timelines given though. It is to be expected that something so entrenched isn't going to die quickly.

 

[Arkadrel]

The question is will the "mainstream" consumer care about 4k (for PC gameing)?
(not just for watching 4k video)

I think for along time most will be fine with 1920x, and eventually these iGPUs will be able to run that fine in all games, even with High-Ultra settings.

Its going to hurt discrete card sales.



The new memory cubes, are a disruptive technology.
Once their out for iGPUs there will a drastic jump in performance, which will mean "mainstream" reaches good enough for 1920x1080 performance.

(sure discretes will jump in memory bandwidth too, but their not currently as bandwidth starved as iGPUs are, and most people dont really care about 4k gameing)

Its obvious to most people that this will be big for iGPUs and hurt discrete GPUs.
People have said this for years, waiting for a new memory technology to come along.

Its right around corner now.

 

[Silverforce11]

The question is will the "mainstream" consumer care about 4k (for PC gameing)?
(not just for watching 4k video)

I think for along time most will be fine with 1920x, and eventually these iGPUs will be able to run that fine in all games, even with High-Ultra settings.

I remember when I was gaming at 1280 x 720p (or less!) and there were 1080p monitors out, it wasn't cheap and only the hardcore PC gamers had it.

Then I got a 1080p monitor, and 1440/1600p was all the rage. Now 4K is all the rage.

Soon 4K will be mainstream due to falling monitor prices and that WILL BE the mainstream standard.

History will repeat itself, that we can be sure of.

 

[WelshBloke]

History will repeat itself, that we can be sure of.

If we're talking history then dGPUs are probably on the way out.

We're down to two mainstream manufacturers (maybe three, is matrox still around?) now and both of them seem desperate to move into other areas.

 

[NTMBK]

And the original argument continues:

>
> I don't think it makes sense to count consoles in the "against" category. If
> anything, they are like discrete GPUs with a token CPU thrown in as a joke.

You're full of it.

One of the big upgrades this time around was that they actually have a reasonable CPU. The CPU's of the previous generation were really pitiful in-order things. The CPU's they have now is in no way "token". It's certainly not high-end, but that's the name of the game: what do you expect from a $400 machine? It's not like the GPU's are all that special either.

Seriously.

> It could be true that hardware-intensive gaming itself is dying and even software rasterizers will eventually
> be "good enough."

That's a total red herring, and shows that you don't understand the market at all, or what I'm saying. I'm not at all saying "software rasterizer" or "lower performance".

Those IGP's are pretty hardware-intensive. And the fact that they are integrated actually allows them to be more efficient. Which was my point.

IGP's have a bad name for historical reasons, but they really are the superior technology. There's a lot of communication between CPU's and GPU's (that traditionally was minimized by having explicit copying and manually managed GPU memory copies), and that really does get much better in an integrated setup. And they allow things that are hard-to-impossible to do on discrete setups exactly because of that shared address space and low latency.

Yes, discrete GPU's certainly still have a performance edge at the top, but it's simply not meaningful enough to matter to most people any more. And in that I include even gamers. The number of people who bought the crazy $1500+ high end was always a tiny, tiny percentage, and those cards were mostly a marketing ("hardware porn") that ended up helping sell the mid-range which were the real bread-and-butter for both nVidia and AMD.

And the low end has already been eclipsed by the IGP's, and that bread-and-butter mid-range is very actively in the process of being so. The vendors know it, too.

Linus

http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=141700&curpostid=141716

 

[AtenRa]

Well at the moment AMD and Nvidia both seem to be trying to diversify away from dGPUs.

AMD have their APUs and Nvidia are chasing the mobile market.

Both AMD and NVIDIA APUs are small with low TDPs, i dont see them having any desire to produce 200-300W TDP APUs for the consumer market. Perhaps they will do it for the Server(HPC) but as of now it seams they prefere to invest in High-End dGPUs.

Edit: People also forgeting you can upgrade the iGPU with a dGPU long time after you bought the PC. So even if you have a 300W TDP APU today, you will need to upgrade down the road and it will be better to upgrade with a new dGPU than to completely upgrade the entire PC (Mobo+APU+ mem ??).

 

[NTMBK]

Edit: People also forgeting you can upgrade the iGPU with a dGPU long time after you bought the PC. So even if you have a 300W TDP APU today, you will need to upgrade down the road and it will be better to upgrade with a new dGPU than to completely upgrade the entire PC (Mobo+APU+ mem ??).

But if your PC came with a balanced APU- enough GPU and bandwidth to match up to the CPU- then there is no point "upgrading", because your CPU would be underpowered for a newer GPU.

 

[sontin]

How did dGPU marketshare and shipment go the last 4 years? In Q1 2010 something like 19 million dGPUs was shipped. In Q1 2014 that was below 14 million.

And yet nVidia hit a record revenue with their discrete GPUs. The OEM market is declining but the pc gaming market is growing.

Its a simple numbers game. When volume is too small, then there wont be anything. Then it doesnt matter how fast a dGPU is over IGP. The dGPU is dead. Its just a question of when.

And that is nonsense. AMD's CPU business has been declining in the recent years. The market doesnt care about iGPU. It cares about CPU performance from a CPU. The discrete GPU market will grow again because people will buy them because they need them.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

Can't help it, but the whole tirade reeks of Captain Obvious stuff topped off with hyperbole.

It's like he decided he needs to remind us he's still around and went for the easy pickings when it comes to saying something provocative, without actually risking anything in the process.

 

[AtenRa]

But if your PC came with a balanced APU- enough GPU and bandwidth to match up to the CPU- then there is no point "upgrading", because your CPU would be underpowered for a newer GPU.

With higher Monitor resolutions you are becoming more and more GPU limited. Even today people with older CPUs upgrade to newer dGPUs.

 

[Genx87]

Yeah and Linux will replace Windows very "soon"

They may be good enough. But right now even the low end dGPU's are better than IGP.

 

[Sohaltang]

The question is will the "mainstream" consumer care about 4k (for PC gameing)?
(not just for watching 4k video)

I think for along time most will be fine with 1920x, and eventually these iGPUs will be able to run that fine in all games, even with High-Ultra settings.

Its going to hurt discrete card sales.

The move to 4K might be closer than you think. Not because everyone needs its or loves it but because the manufacturers will force it out there. 1080 TV prices are dropping and a few years back they added 3D to make some extra profit. Now every decent TV made has it built in, even if you dont use it. Same thing will happen with 4K. I know people with 600$ low end 1080 TV's that come over and tell me about the awesome 4K TV's they saw at best buy. I would say in 5 years we will see a mass push for 4K. The upper end PC gamers will upgrade in the next 2-3 years. Your going to need tons and tons of GPU to run those machines. I run 2 780 TI classified in SLI @ 1440P/120hz and many games never see 120 FPS

 

[Mand]

The only way the dGPU will be going away is if gamers are happy running at 20 FPS on new games.

Somehow, I doubt that will happen. Sure, console devs have been getting a bit sloppy lately, but is that really a long-term trend or just new-platform disruption?

This reminds me completely of "computers are fast enough, they don't need to be faster" talk. Sure, you don't need much for checking your email. But that only means that the low end changes, not the high end. They'll still be making the professional-level compute cards, because that just won't go away because you can play Angry Birds on an iGPU. And that will filter down to the rest of us.

Give a programmer processing resources, and they will be used.