The reasons you give are the same ones I think, IMO, that we wont see too many addons cards/chips in the future. PCs were more diverse when they average PC cost well over USD$2,000 or more. You will have a hard time convincing OEMs and whitebox makers that including more chips, which is more expensive, to do these tasks. Margins are tights and splitting the money even more ways hurts more companies.
If an existing part, be it CPU or GPU, can make themselves more useful for these tasks I think they will win out in the main consumer market (even if they stink, comparatively). Being the first to have a mainstream solution pretty much means you win. e.g. CELL is great at floats, but at 250M transistors you are talking about adding a lot of cost, power consumption, and heat. A dual purpose device, be it an Intel/AMD CPU or NV/ATI GPU would be more functional on the whole for most users. And of course it is the big companies who control the product channels. Intel has it on easy street because they can push out a new technology pretty easily. NV and ATI are next in that they are in 40% of PCs and with the move toward Vista they should be looking at explosive growth and have SIGNIFICANTLY more impact on PC performance and expansion in the future.
The Sound Card market is a good example, IMO, where inferior general parts and offloading work onto the CPU spelled the doom for that market. It was a growing pain, but right now I would say MOST gamers are using integrated sound. The difference is nominal, and the savings in cost (last time I checked ~$75 for a decent up to date Sound Card; $200+ for the new technology) and the performance is negligable. And of course developers are shunning / under utilizing the Sound Cards (read: Creative) because, well, they are not standard. Yeah they are nice, but why spend a lot of time and money when most people wont notice, therefore wont buy your product based on that reason?
This is why I think PPUs will fail. They are an addon card. Expensive at that. Further, they are only usable in certain situations (games that support them) which is a chicken or the egg approach.
So personally, and just my opinion (which is obviously slanted from watching the PC sector since '86) is that due to the importance of sub-$1000 PCs that any technology to make a splash and significant impact needs to 1. control cost and 2. maximize pentration and 3. having a part that is usefull as often as possible (either being dual use like Dual GPU that can do both tasks OR multifunctional units be incorperated into an existing product to lower costs of redundancy, e.g. CPUs or GPUs that have specialized units or can spend resources doing other side tasks at the cost of the primary goal).
The only players, imo, who can do that are Intel, AMD, NV, and ATI. I think ATI/NV have an inside track due to the fact the overlap in market is EXCELLENT and their frequent product updates puts them in a good position for this. I don't see or hear anything from Intel or AMD indicating they will have a solution coming soon.
So the solutions we may see may not be excellent at first, but I think proprietary designs that are offered through addon devices are a hard
sell, even for
CELL & PPUs in the PC space. Yeah, bad pun
