(03-12-2014, 07:20 PM)degasus Wrote: delroth: Yeah, it's very unlikely to drop x86 soon but imo still more likely than dropping polygon based gpus
I don't know about that. GPUs are heading more and more towards being general purpose, fast SIMD/SMT processors. I wouldn't be surprised to see graphics-specific features like rasterization and z-sorting becoming more configurable/replaceable in the future. At least I find this way more likely than x86 becoming obsolete / being emulated on other architectures.
In the end, not much is changing: people create new interesting architectures that are used for coprocessing (GPUs, Tilera-style many cores architecture, things like the new Micron automaton CPU, ...), but where things have standardized on x86 nothing has come close to replacing it (reminder: phones might have standardized on ARM, but they never standardized on x86 in the past).