AMD Bulldozer versus Intel Sandy Bridge versus NVIDIA CUDA

AMD Bulldozer versus Intel Sandy Bridge versus NVIDIA CUDA
By William Jiang, MLS

The new battleground for microprocessors is now the realm of graphics, and there are three major combatants: AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. Intel produced the Sandy Bridge series of processors which integrate the Computer Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). This integration of CPU and GPU seems to be a trend for the future. AMD’s flavor of this hybrid CPU and GPU is called an APU or Accelerated Processing Unit. AMD’s new processor architecture named Bulldozer has come out with their first chip aimed at the mobile segment: Llano.

The “system on a chip” was not always in existence. Since the Intel 8066 chip came out in 1978 video cards handled video, and the CPU was divided into the CU (Control Unit) and ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) and never did the two meet. NVIDIA emerged as the video card power more than a decade ago, and relatively recently NVIDIA started the CUDA technologies which gamers and people involved in multimedia use for drastic improvements in performance. As of yet, a strong CPU with a strong NVIDIA video card combination’s performance can not be touched by an integrated CPU/GPU as of yet, so NVIDIA has some breathing room. However, as the CPU/GPU integration becomes tighter, NVIDIA may need to find a strategic partner in AMD or Intel.