Intel Corp (INTC)

[wbmw]

Re: I am more disappointed about the slow current rate of progress for video cards/GPUs

I think what you see is going to be what you get.

ATI just took the leap from 55nm to 40nm, doubled up on resources, launched a 30% larger die size than their previous generation, and still put 2 chips on a card that needs a ton of power saving features just to stay within a 300W power envelope.

The next node is 28nm, but that won't come until 2011 most likely.

I don't know where you expect the next leap in performance to come from, since graphics performance is mostly derived from their large arrays of math units, which will only dissipate more power and take up more silicon area as they increase in number. Not to mention all the silicon required for increasingly complex on-die communication, because remember: ATI and nVidia want to do more general purpose computing on their cores, and it's not like the logic for that comes for free.