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vivster said:

Conina said:

Good enough for a transition period, if it is easier/cheaper to separate it at first, also good for upgraders.

Floating-point-calculations were separated on co-processors (x87) a lot of years, until they were integrated in the main CPU.

3D-acceleration was separated on extra GPUs (3DFX) a few years.

Remember when they offloaded graphics calculations to expansion cards called GPUs? Good thing that never took root.

That went a bit differently.

Graphics have always been handled by separate chips, same for audio. However in the past (mostly the 80's) , this could have been an entire array of separate chips to reach the result that was wanted.

This is also why graphics and sound cards are even a thing - there were just too many chips to put them all on the motherboard and needed their own RAM (unified RAM with overlapping or same memory address spaces wasn't a thing yet), so they got put onto extension cards to create more space. With the advent of 3D graphics, they also increasingly needed more cooling, first passive, then active, along with more bandwidth, so including them in the CPU like most other parts that were external before (Floating point processing unit, Northbridge, Southbridge...) wasn't exactly feasible without massive performance losses (hello APUs!). As a result of all this, we're using extension cards for GPUs to this very day, and is probably the only extension card which will survive for a long time for all the reasons mentioned above.