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Last month I briefly mentioned the opinions of Tim Sweeney and John Carmack regarding the future direction of GPUs.

Intel has been spending enormous amounts of capital to develop Larrabee, an integrated GPGPU/ray-tracing solution and as a result, speaks about the death of discrete graphic solutions (like those from Nvidia or ATI).

In fact, 2 weeks ago an engineer at Intel said as much regarding the short-term future of the industry.

So last week, the CEO of Nvidia replied by saying they would open up a can of whoop ass — seriously.

And to top that off, last week Cevat Yerli a programmer behind the CryTek engine also weighed in on the debate.

Based on all of these discussions, it is apparent that the only player that seems to believe that discrete graphics and rasterization will soon disappear is Intel. None of the independent developers that actually write software applications (e.g., games) believe the agitprop from Intel. Nor do arch-enemies, ATI or Nvidia.

And in case you missed it, Nvidia recently partnered up with Via… because they read the tea leaves and understood that to remain competitive they needed a legitimate pool of talent that has a proven track record with the x86 ISA.

A review of the players:

Intel has Havok and Larrabee
AMD has ATI (and licensing agreements with IBM)
Nvidia has Ageia and Via