It's a next step that AMD has been trying to make happen for like 10 years, but not managing to make it commercially successful in anything but consoles, ending up permanently stuck in the lowest low end of the market. In both the PC and datacenter market spaces it has ended up with basically the opposite of product market fit. Nobody actually wants the generic CPU compute tied to the GPU compute.
The PC gamers really want the GPU component to be separately upgradable from the CPU. Non-gamer PC users don't care about the GPU performance, just cost. The datacenter folks want to be able to use a single $1k CPU to host $100k worth of GPUs.
It's plausible that AI accelerators follow a different path for the consumers. It's harder to see it happening for the datacenter market.
Being able to switch from an optimized CPU-centric workload to an optimized GPU-centric workload without any hardware changes sounds useful to me.
You could even do unified memory with upgradeable separate CPU and GPU. You won’t get the benefits of having them on the same chip, but there’s nothing intrinsic about the separation requiring separate memory space.
The PC gamers really want the GPU component to be separately upgradable from the CPU. Non-gamer PC users don't care about the GPU performance, just cost. The datacenter folks want to be able to use a single $1k CPU to host $100k worth of GPUs.
It's plausible that AI accelerators follow a different path for the consumers. It's harder to see it happening for the datacenter market.