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While particular approaches in graphics processing units design have been pretty different for leading computer visual companies ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp., in future the architecture of GPUs from the firms may be fundamentally different, as executives from both companies proclaim different approaches for chip internal architectures.

NVIDIA Disagrees with ATI Technologies

ATI Technologies’ developer relations manager Richard Huddy said last month during a conference in London, UK, that the company’s future visual processing units will feature unified pixel and shader processing. While he declined to elaborate on the timeframes for such chips, he said unified pixel and vertex data processing is a required capability for Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0 that comes out together with Microsoft’s next-generation operating system called Windows Longhorn. On of the benefits the unified approach brings is ability to dynamically allocate chip resources depending on the demand for pixel and vertex processing, Mr. Huddy said. Another one is simplified software development.

NVIDIA Corp.’s chief architect David Kirk called the unified graphics engines as an implementation detail, not a feature, but admitted the unified architecture would be nice for programmers, who would have one instruction set for vertex and pixel shaders.

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Source: X-BitLabs