We're basically approaching the part of the Myer and Sutherland wheel of reincarnation[0] where the display processor is as powerful as the main processor and therefore it should all be folded back together. Of course, this turn was anticipated by AMD well in advance, and the GCN architecture, APU hardware, etc., all plays into it.
At the end of the day, the optimization envelope is always shifting around, and industrial computing architectures chase that incrementally, so they'll always be looping around the wheel as today's "narrow fast path" gradually becomes tomorrow's "general purpose".
At the end of the day, the optimization envelope is always shifting around, and industrial computing architectures chase that incrementally, so they'll always be looping around the wheel as today's "narrow fast path" gradually becomes tomorrow's "general purpose".
[0] http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...