It's mostly marketing gimmicks though - they aren't adding anywhere near enough compute for that future. The tensor cores in an "AI ready" laptop from a year ago are already pretty much irrelevant as far as inferencing current-generation models go.

I had a Xolo Tegra Note 7 tablet (marketed in the US as EVGA Tegra Note 7) in around 2013. I preordered it as far as I remember. It had a Tegra 4 SoC with quad core Cortex A15 CPU and a 72 core GeForce GPU. Nvidia used to claim that it is the fastest SoC for mobile devices at the time.

To this day, it's the best mobile/Android device I ever owned. I don't know if it was the fastest, but it certainly was the best performing one I ever had. UI interactions were smooth, apps were fast on it, screen was bright, touch was perfect and still had long enough battery backup. The device felt very thin and light, but sturdy at the same time. It had a pleasant matte finish and a magnetic cover that lasted as long as the device did. It spolied the feel of later tablets for me.

It had only 1 GB RAM. We have much more powerful SoCs today. But nothing ever felt that smooth (iPhone is not considered). I don't know why it was so. Perhaps Android was light enough for it back then. Or it may have had a very good selection and integration of subcomponents. I was very disappointed when Nvidia discontinued the Tegra SoC family and tablets.

I'd argue their current CPUs aren't to be discounted either. Much as people love to crown Apple's M-series chips as the poster child of what arm can do, Nvidia's grace CPUs too trade blows with the best of the best.

It leaves one to wonder what could be if they had any appetite for devices more in the consumer realm of things.

In the home computer universe, such computers were the first ones having a programmable graphics unit that did more than paste the framebuffer into the screen.

While the PCs were still displaying text, or if you were lucky to own an Hercules card, gray text, or maybe a CGA one, with 4 colours.

While the Amigas, which I am more confortable with, were doing this in the mid-80's:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7Px-ZkObTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A

The original Amiga 1000, had on its motherboard, later reduced to fit into an Amiga 500,

Motorola 68000 CPU, a programmable sounds chip with DMA channels (Paula), and a programable blitter chip (Agnus aka early GPUs).

You would build in RAM the audio, or graphics instructions for the respetive chipset, set the DMA parameters, and let them lose.

In the olden days we didn't have GPUs, we had "CRT controllers".

What it offered you was a page of memory where each byte value mapped to a character in ROM. You feed in your text and the controller fetches the character pixels and puts them on the display. Later we got ASCII box drawing characters. Then we got sprite systems like the NES, where the Picture Processing Unit handles loading pixels and moving sprites around the screen.

Eventually we moved on to raw framebuffers. You get a big chunk of memory and you draw the pixels yourself. The hardware was responsible for swapping the framebuffers and doing the rendering on the physical display.

Along the way we slowly got more features like defining a triangle, its texture, and how to move it, instead of doing it all in software.

Up until the 90s when the modern concept of a GPU coalesced, we were mainly pushing pixels by hand onto the screen. Wild times.

The history of display processing is obviously a lot more nuanced than that, it's pretty interesting if that's your kind of thing.

You are right, hence my "in a certain sense", because I was too lazy to point out the differences between a motherboard having everything there without pluggable graphics unit[0], and having everything now inside of a single chip.

[0] - Not fully correct, as there are/were extensions cards that override the bus, thus replacing one of the said chips, on Amiga case.

GPU compute units are not that simple, the main difference with CPU is that they generally use a combination of wide SIMD and wide SMT to hide latency, as opposed to the power-intensive out-of-order processing used by CPU's. Performing tasks that can't take advantage of either SIMD or SMT on GPU compute units might be a bit wasteful.

Also you'd need to add extra hardware for various OS support functions (privilege levels, address space translation/MMU) that are currently missing from the GPU. But the idea is otherwise sound, you can think of the 'Mill' proposed CPU architecture as one variety of it.

As I recall, Gartner made the outrageous claim that upwards of 70% of all computing will be “AI” in some number of years - nearly the end of cpu workloads.

[dead]

I still would like to see a general GPU back end for LLVM just for fun.

People on here tend to act as if 20% of all computers sold were laptops, when it’s the reverse.