Graphics Processing Unit. If your computer parts worked at the speed of light, you would only need around 2,500 parts to replace everything in a laptop with roughly 12 billion. All those extra parts are a cheap way to make it go just a little faster and do more. The graphics card or integrated graphics are what run the display and do parallel processing, crunching matrices, that doesn't require extreme accuracy. These can be particularly useful for graphics, physics, and AI applications, and your laptop will soon be able to cop an attitude if you want. I'm working on the Monty Carlo statistics and analog logic to give the bots more swing in their hips, while the Japanese specialize in making them more friendly.
What the hell is Intel doing? They need to sort out their processor manufacturing, we don't need another GPU brand. AMD is kicking their ass on the CPU front so open up another front to get destroyed on. Not fucking smart. Intel is like Nazi Germany, taking on Russia and British/American Allies all at once. Jesus Christ! Somebody check and see if Robert Swans hands are trembling uncontrollably.
Samsung and TSMC now have 7nm chips, with the next 5nm chips capable of holding perhaps 30 billion transistors, or enough for three laptops. The problem is, the more transistors you squeeze onto them the harder it is to coordinate everything, with communication across the chip itself becoming a latency issue. AMD has their chiplets, using stacks of memory connected to the processor and gpu, but Intel is going 3D with a vengeance. Their newest chips are just 22mm in total size, because they stack one on top of another, and using the smallest chips possible makes them cheaper to manufacture. So far Intel has reported no issues with stacking memory right on top of the processor, and their new chips include HBM memory, where using the smallest chips possible could save money again. The real insanity comes in when you add distributed computing and AI into the mix. Once you get the capacity of a serious graphics card onto a single chip it just makes sense to add all kinds of AI into the mix for greater efficiency. That's physics, ray tracing, and other applications that the entire graphics pipeline can be redesigned around for physical rendering. Its a huge undertaking, but Intel and Microsoft have been working on it for at least a decade. You could say our current graphics cards and computers are comparable to steam engines, and nobody has had the power to do all that much with making them more flexible and easier to deal with, but all that is about to change at once, with Intel once again redefining the modern PC. They invented it all, the x86 architecture and just about everything about modern computing. They are shooting for 15 watt chips that do what AMD's 30 watt chips do, and I suspect the two will keep that up until they reach the limits of current CMOS transistor technology, but transistors that are 10,000x more efficient are possible, virtually eliminating heat as a problem and allowing a laptop to run for days on a single charge. Intel's already made a few moves in this direction, making their new high bandwidth CXL interface open source, and its pretty clear the new 10nm chips are practice for when they break out the new transistor technology. Sadly, most think of Intel as cutting edge, but its consumer crap they make, albeit extremely expensive crap, but their specialty is cheap and not cutting edge. Intel might as well be a bank filled with engineers all calculating the costs, but they make so much money and have such absolute control over the market they can dole out cheesy technology forever and still stay ahead of the competition.
Intel also own 49% of Mcafee, the antivirus virus parasite that gets bundled with every other piece of hardware and software.
