Alex St. John: “Consoles as We Know Them are Gone”

S So certainly Intel is producing a new generation of chips that have CPU and GPU on the same die which share access to the cache—the L1 cache—coming out in maybe 2009. Those chips should have two interesting capabilities. They should theoretically, in terms of traditional Direct3D performance, be maybe five to ten times faster than the current chips on the market, but they may also have some graphics capabilities that don’t exist anywhere on the market because of the change in architecture.

Because unifying the GPU with the CPU can produce dramatically faster vector processing and shared rendering performance between the CPU and GPU, so guys like Tim Sweeney will probably have to build their game engines, or may increasingly build their game engines, in entirely different ways than they used to in order to take advantage of the different architecture.

And Intel and AMD are planning on putting those chips into their mainstream consumer laptops, and although it’s going to take a year or two for that to happen, it’s still going to happen in an era in which the existing generation of consoles are well obsolete, they’re slow, they haven’t improved in performance in five years, they’re nearing the edge of their lifespan, and consumer PCs shipping in that area, including the laptops, could have equal to or superior gaming capabilities. So you can say that certainly the intention appears to be in the right place.

And sometimes a single computer is an entire galaxy. I know mine certainly has been a number of times. Hell, my computer has simulated the history of our civilization a thousand times over.

Soon your average laptop will be like an XBOX 1080 and 2 years before MS’s next mass DRM-box.