Originally Posted by
Synthaxx
Maybe those chips are well suited for gaming, but that's more a side effect of the improvements in the architecture and not as some direct focus on gaming. It just happens that gaming is big business and their chips coincided with what gamers wanted. Also, multithreading isn't the future any more, it's the present (even the past, if you want). You could say parallel processing is the present, and using GPU's for processing instead, but yeah, multithreading isn't big any more, it's standard.
Roll back to 2005 or so, and you'll see that multithreading was the big thing that everyone should be doing. It was possible, but it was still complicated. Roll to 2006, and it was 64-bit. 2008, standardisation of architectures (e.g. Hyperthreading not requiring special code to take advantage of). 2 of those are now "old news", the other has sort of died out for all but the largest applications (64-bit, mainly reserved for media program in the consumer sector, and scientific programs in education). The last one in that list also applies to GPU's. I remember when details were revealed about NVIDIA's DX10 cards and their 384-bit bus. At that time, I was on another forum, and it baffled some of the regulars for a while.
It's easier than ever to make a program multithreaded. Even a blank program built with tools from the past 2-3 years will create multiple threads. For example, my own programs spawn 10 or so threads of their own the moment I start to work on them. If I want to run my own code in a thread, know how many lines of additional code it takes to do so? 2. There's limitation to what you can do in threads (don't mess with the interface or things being run in other threads) which might mean you need to rewrite your code and split it into multiple routines, but 2 lines to multithread code is all it takes. Even then, these lines are very short, with one of them simply being the opener for the new code and the other only being a procedure definition in itself. This isn't even an official implementation either, it's a third-party project that someone was good enough to make simple. It's just no big deal any more to make something multithreaded. There's only so far you can go with threads before the performance you gain becomes too negligable to warrant another thread (hence why MMO's are typically viewed with a level of contempt).
As for Intel picking up 3DFX, I dare say that it'd have simply meant that their IGP's would have come about earlier and the market would have moved to mobile a lot sooner never giving a thought for the desktop market. Sure, we'd have hardware, but I think both hardware and software would be a lot different and that much research would have been skipped in the process.