In the old days gamers paid extra for sound cards etc., all these multimedia addons gradually got commoditised. I don't think it would've been a completely crazy bet to assume the same was going to happen to the GPU.
Of course it’s not actually the CPU doing the work, it’s just in the same package.
Part of the difference is that audio can only get so good. But graphics don’t have much of a limit yet. We kept adding more colors and higher resolutions and higher refresh rates, more polygons, and even a second display for true 3-D.
It’s the true embarrassingly parallel problem we’re throwing more silicon at it just keeps making it better.
By the time Intel decided to get “serious“ and develop Larrabee, they clearly saw the market was there and would keep growing otherwise they wouldn’t have even bothered.
And honestly, whether it was on the same package as the CPU or an actual part of it the way normal vector units or the branch predictor are, who would benefit more from having a good graphics story to go on their GPU than the king of CPUs. They could use their advantages to just further cement their moat.
This was already solved 7 years ago, but few games actually make use of it: https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
Same problem IBM had. They didn’t like people using “their“ PC architecture, so they decided to make the MCA bus and other proprietary stuff. Force everyone to do what they want.
IBM‘s AMD was Compaq and all the clone makers. They all got together and used their power to prevent the market from being screwed up by IBM.
I could really see Intel wanting to make that kind of move but it never would’ve worked in reality.
I still think ia64 was sunk by the let-the-compiler-do-it tarpit. There were ambivalent aspects such as, at the time, questions of power or chip area. But things like memory latency are just not predictable enough to do strictly in-order pipelines. OoO won.
Had AMD not been around with AMD64, the industry would have had to get it working no matter what, HP and Microsoft were already on the Itanium train, and if production of x86 got slowly replaced by Itanium that was it, Windows and HP-UX would drag the ecosystems into it, and eventually the remaining issues would be sorted out.
For what it's worth, I followed Itanium as an IT industry analyst and wrote a short book recently on the topic. https://s3.amazonaws.com/bitmasons.com/docs/Lessons+from+the...
AFAICT, they expected Itanium to own the high end server/HPC market, while 32-bit x86 would continue supporting PC’s for another decade.
That seems remarkably short-sighted in retrospect.
UNIX systems, I also doubt, as we were still in the days each vendor had their own CPUs.