The whole videocard business has been blooming the last ten years amazingly. From integrated graphics on the motherboard to quad-SLI/Crossfire setups, NVIDIA and ATI have shifted their component structure in the PC overboard, says just about everyone without gold studded pants.

The last few years have brought about the need for dual videocards in machines, which was considered a bold step by both companies but is now frowned upon by critics. "Multi-core CPUs will put an end to multi-GPU madness", an Intel technologist said, reminding us that newer graphics cards like the ATI 3870 X2, NVIDIA 9800 and all versions of these two now sport more than one processor per card.

Unlike the CPU, no limit has (supposedly) been reached to top frequencies that the processor can safely reach, and critics claim that a second or third videocard is simply a short-term method of attaining more funds for research that is desperately needed to get newer, faster cards out on the market.

However, the multi-core CPU's are predicted to rid completely of the multi-core and single-core videocards of today. With current CPU's on the market utilizing up to four cores, and others like the Cell processor native to the PlayStation 3 sporting eight, Moore's law will force, if you will, that computers outgrow the need for discrete video processing.

Having said that "multi-core CPUs will put an end to multi-GPU madness and that people 'probably won't need' discrete cards in the future", we fully agree and endorse it. This also would give AMD the upper hand again in the CPU market, which it lost once Intel rolled out it's dual-core processors for reasonable prices. AMD's ownership of ATI will make the shift from making both types of processors to just one much easier than what will happen to NVIDIA, which is still currently unknown.

Considering that it will also be much easier on the consumer, who will no longer have to worry about which graphics card(s) to buy but simply which chipset, we expect the market to follow Intel's current ideal.

[TGDaily via PC World]