[Alpine]

So what is the brain of the machine now?


SOURCES INDICATE to the INQ that when ATI launches its R580 chip on the 24th of January next, the beastie will perform at a staggering 1.1 teraflops.


That's quite a few flops more than a CPU, which is generally reckoned to be the brain of a computer.

But as the eyes are connected intimately to the brain and as graphics chips provide eyecandy where CPUs cannot, it seems to us the brain-microprocessor link has to be downgraded.

It was 16 years ago when Intel predicted that by the year 2000 every function of a computer would be part of the microprocessor. That did not come to pass.

Perhaps the CPU, now it's multicore, is like the Doctor Who and Captain Kirk of a computer and rather than its brain, the microprocessor is its heart, constantly ticking, rather than its head, constantly thinking. The dilithium crystals in a computer are possibly its gonads.

The chipset remains the nervous system of a computer, the feet are the things that a laptop rests on, and an integrated graphics chipset is always second best to the real thing, baby.

Former Intel chief architect Bob Colwell once remarked that the graphics chip manufacturers can only go so far before the resolution of the eye is exceeded, and there is surely truth in that. The bowels of a computer are [that's enough bodily analogies, Ed.]

The INQuirer