Dedicated GPU are dead for general computing. The whole market converged on APU because they are simply more efficient.
There is plenty of competition there: Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek and of course Intel and AMD, and things are moving fast. The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.
General computing has not required a dedicated GPU for nearly 20 years, I would argue that the continued perseverance of Windows hinges on a handful of productivity software and, for ordinary people, crucially, games. So judging a market so completely, based on "general" computing is too shallow.
> The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.
Which is, itself, an APU.
The question is, is it better than a 2020 era dGPU and CPU combo (at any thermal/power envelope).
The answer is complicated unfortunately, but a 3090 (a 5 year old card) has 4x the memory bandwidth of an M4 Pro and also about 4x the FP32 performance.
So on the high end, descrete graphics cards are still going to be king for gaming. (I know that a 3090 isn't common, but 5080s are more powerful than 3090s).
There are a whole raft of other GPU companies out there (Broadcom, MediaTek, PowerVR, Samsung, Qualcomm, ...), but none of them interested in the classic PC gaming space.
And I'm not sure that space has been economical for a long time. Integrated GPUs have more-or-less reached a point where they can handle PC games (albeit not at the latest-and-greatest resolutions/frame-rates/ray-tracing/etc), and the market for multi-thousand-dollar dedicated GPUs just isn't very big
StopDisinfo910|4 months ago
There is plenty of competition there: Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek and of course Intel and AMD, and things are moving fast. The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.
dijit|4 months ago
> The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.
Which is, itself, an APU.
The question is, is it better than a 2020 era dGPU and CPU combo (at any thermal/power envelope).
The answer is complicated unfortunately, but a 3090 (a 5 year old card) has 4x the memory bandwidth of an M4 Pro and also about 4x the FP32 performance.
So on the high end, descrete graphics cards are still going to be king for gaming. (I know that a 3090 isn't common, but 5080s are more powerful than 3090s).
swiftcoder|4 months ago
And I'm not sure that space has been economical for a long time. Integrated GPUs have more-or-less reached a point where they can handle PC games (albeit not at the latest-and-greatest resolutions/frame-rates/ray-tracing/etc), and the market for multi-thousand-dollar dedicated GPUs just isn't very big
jacquesm|4 months ago
What market research underpins this?
unknown|4 months ago
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