Gulf News

Battle for supremacy in graphic processing turns bitter

Nvidia had been lording over all, but AMD and Intel are catching up

- DUBAI BYAHMEDAL ZAROUNI Special to Gulf News Ahmed Al Zarouni is a Dubaibased tech consultant.

The competitio­n is at its most intense between AMD and Intel on the processor front, with no clear winner so far.

Sometimes, AMD prevails by a wide margin, and at other times, it’s Intel — but this is not the subject of our discussion today. Apart from the fierce competitio­n between Intel and AMD, the latter is also engaged in an even more intense one with Nvidia on graphics processors.

And Nvidia has spared no effort in responding to all attacks. This bodes well in this highly sensitive industry, given that a lot of what’s being built now used these companies’ products.

Data processing

Some may not know the importance of graphics processors and howthey contribute directly and indirectly to the next stage of computing and virtual, augmented, and hybrid worlds. As well as in the developmen­t of films, games, engineerin­g advances, photograph­y, geographic systems, military and security systems, and much more.

These processors are responsibl­e for transformi­ng huge amounts of informatio­n with full accuracy and detailing into a visual world that includes all the details. If we look at these technologi­es from just 10 years ago, we will find that a great deal has changed since.

The use of graphics processors in e- games requires a huge amount of small cores that process significan­t amounts of data at the same time. The number of cores may reach more than 3,500, while the CPU computer processors of Intel today do not exceed more than 48 cores, while in AMD it reaches 64 cores. And perhaps more in the latest versions of both.

But there is a difference between these numbers and the number of cores in graphics processors, because each has a different task from the other. Let’s imagine a central data processor that can be classified as a “manager”, and the number of cores and the amount of data it can execute may be classified as “employees”.

These processors have moved from being additional pieces for playing e- games on computers to be the basic processors in analysing data, complex and long arithmetic operations, as well as help with machine learning systems, artificial intelligen­ce, and mapping a virtual and augmented world. It can even monitor routine changes in security systems using the most complex machine learning algorithms, through which it detects if anything unusual occurs such as a car going in the wrong direction, a traffic accident, or someone simply leaving a bag.

Among the important applicatio­ns using graphics processors are autonomous driving, as well as computer- generated voice analysis and recognitio­n, analysis of chronic diseases, broadcasti­ng, animation, and creation of games and virtual worlds.

A closer look

The arena until now was empty for Nvidia, which was actually competing with itself, wondering what to add in the next year for people to buy its devices again. But nothing lasts forever. We see AMD come out strongly with several processors that we can easily be recommend due to the price difference and a robust strong performanc­e such as the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

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