Do you guys think that Dedicated graphics cards will go away in the near future say 5-10 years? With AMD's kaveri apu's it could be the future of graphics hardware. Any thoughts?
It's possible, but I doubt it. For small form factor, portable lower cost or low power solutions APU makes loads of sense. But if space and money aren't a huge issue, then dedicated GPUs will still give you better performance and more flexibility in many situations. Especially in terms of graphics specific upgradability.
not in the next 10 years, but in the long run yes absolutely.
The future is SoC (system on a chip).
However the desktop computer is probably here to stay: my guess is that desktop systems will contain lots of SoCs and become tabletop-supercomputers.
I imagine that enthusiasts will be a running primitive versions of a holodeck (i.e no touchable matter) with dektop-SoC-clusters (dsocc) and eye-projectors. (running linux... obviously).
I think it will either switch to all APU, or an inbuilt CPU and GPU. Where the GPU is a chip in a socket on your motherboard, just like the CPU is, and can be interchanged.
My (admittedly pessimistic and dystopian) vision for the future of home computers is thin clients harshly controlled by centralized powers that dole out cloud-based processing power according to the terms of a subscription plan. In that case, specialized, small and cheap hardware (with reduced instruction sets and aggressive Trusted Platform restrictions) will be the order of the day, so APUs seem likely.
Optimistically, I like Phantom's idea, especially if bus technology can get far enough ahead of graphics and central processing so you could hang on to a motherboard for a while. It's always bugged me that upgrading your video card means buying new everything--including stuff that might be fine or even worse on the new card (fan, PCI interface).
Discrete cards will always be more powerful. For example, even today the latency for transferring from memory is higher in an integrated cpu/apu than just sending it to a discrete card. There are methods to improve upon this for both but you only have so much room on a cpu die whereas a discrete gpu is dedicated. At the end of the day your integrated graphics are subpar and always will be versus buying a discrete card. I don't see this changing in 5-10 years.
Your pessimistic view is never going to happen. By the time somebody found the magic sauce to bend the laws of physics to get around latency problem of cloud based-anything. It's likely that hobbyist will be able to make their own free open-source hardware (including table top IC "makers").
The current trend to lock down computers is a feeble attempt to delay the inevitable. "They" are already failing spectacularly to contain something as harmless as Piracy. As time progresses more people will become computer-literate, and recognize what we know now & start demanding more control, privacy & autonomy.
We are probably going to see proprietary software & hardware becoming more & more restrictive driving more & more people in the arms of Free Open-source. I'm expecting that in 10yrs even the mighty Ms Windows is going to be a tiny niche-market, for old unadaptable people. Microsoft doing a 180 & going open-source is not entirely impossible.
My personnel experience is that it's becoming easier to convince people to come to the light side.