Speculation – Raise of AMD, Fall of Nvidia, Intel struggles in the new APU era.

This is not news to those of us who've been keeping track of the next CPU that can play our favourite games in the highest possible resolution.

AMD will be coming out with an APU in 2011, a CPU+GPU hybrid processing unit and I have put my theory in my mouth and speculate that AMD will see a revival of their business to squarely compete with Intel very soon.

I believe the APU AMD is working on will in fact be revolutionary, and may in the future render standalone GPUs obsolete. Hence Nvidia, who's core business model relies on the GPUs will most likely see a lot more of their market share simply disappearing into a new area.

Intel would be scared of this advancement as back in the days of the Athlon FX, AMD beat Intel's processors by miles in terms of gaming performance and propelled AMD into the limelight for a while until Intel's come back with the Core CPU.

Intel itself is also working on a CPU+GPU, but the problem Intel has, is that it doesn't really have a GPU that is powerful enough to compete with AMD ATI's offerings. Hence why, I believe, should AMD pull it off in 2011, Nvidia and Intel would be the perfect match to tackle AMD ATI.

This all boils down to whether AMD can successfully pull it off of course, but have faith, as I believe, APU will actually not only be beneficial for space and power, but also performance. This requires a little more explanation, but essentially, when CPU+GPU can interact within the same processor unit, the communication latency would be dramatically reduced as the lines from the GPU does not need to travel the same amount of distance to get to the CPU, hence increasing performance.

How would ordinary users be able to install an APU powered PC, we still have not much idea today, but it's a good bet that whatever the case, AMD is on the right track.

Did I also mention AMD ATI's graphics cards would be used in all Mac computer range soon?

Disclosure: I own AMD shares.

UPDATE: 31/07/2010. APU performance numbers for Ontario leaked: http://is.gd/dU8Ms Can't wait for Orochi.

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