Graphics acceleration on second core of dual-core CPU?

I appreciate the respons and I completely realize that for the most part, gaming is not necessarily a priority for most users--and therefore, why bother integrating it if, say, only ~10% of users would even benefit from sucha thing? But what about the smaller population of gamers? Do you think that the execution of such a thing is impractical? I can understand that for multi-tasking on a multi-core computer, sure, you wouldn't typically want that bogging down your system. But for single-threaded games, why not? I just don't see what's stopping this. Any insight as to the possible hardware limitations and why a dedicated graphics card would be more preferred than a full-fledged CPU doing the graphics processing while the other runs a game? Because I can't think of any reason why not. Thanks again.

Multi-core systems will probably not be aimed at 'light users'. I think I mentioned the digital media areas including photography, video, and audio. This processing, particularly video and even more particularly high definition video, is not 'light use'. It is VERY cpu intensive work. Since heavy duty video cards already handle hard core gamers, there is no need to load the cpu with the same work. Those who need intensive video card type support, will continue to look to the card where the hardware can be optimized to the job. Those who do not need intensive display support, will not want systems which bog down the cpu with those functions.

Video cards which steal main memory have been tried in the past. They failed. Again, most people do not want to share main memory with the video card. Video memory is best located on the video card where it can be optimized, and where it will not interfere with the work that the cpu is doing.

Multi-core is aimed at offering more processing power where a brick wall has been hit in the effort to increase chip speeds. The idea is to obtain the speed without consuming ever larger amounts of power which creates heating problems. Designers will not want to divert that power to unnecessary video support.

I think I didn't communicate properly--I meant something along the lines of building a "mostly gaming, not so much anything else" computer (which, I guess, is pretty much an XBOX or PS3). I was mainly trying to emphasize gaming, which, for now, is single threaded/single-core dependant. I mean, it's going to get to the point where (maybe) a graphics card GPU is as fast as a typical CPU, and comes standard with as much ram as well (well, likely computer system hardware will advance too to the point where graphics cards won't be literally equal, but it's getting close right now...)--A few Nvidia and ATI cards are already reaching 1.4 GHz GPU Speeds, with 1 GB ram--that's more than a lot of people's CPU/system memory. I think my argument is contingent upon most applications being single-threaded, and people not really multi-tasking when playing a game or doing video editing (which isn't true, I understand that). Once multiple-threaded applications start to become common, my idea is likely useless due to efficient usage of multiple cores on a single application. It's just that I don't understand why some graphics cards are running over a grand when it seems like you could use main CPU's and system RAM to build a faster graphics "card." I'm not sure why it's not going that direction.

Regarding integrated video cards sharing system memory--this has only failed because systems that use an integrated video card that shares system ram typically lack sufficient amount of system ram and bandwith for this purpose--I'm thinking in terms of Large sets of dual-channel RAM, which the graphics chpiset can allocate in large, say, 1 GB blocks for video processing (say, if a computer has 4 GB dual-channel system RAM, during gaming, why can't 2 GB be devoted to running the system/game, and the other two be devoted to graphics processing--just like using a secondary core). I totally understand why integrated graphics failed before--due to poor hardware configurations, and I'm not about to jump ship on the dedicated video card idea, don't get me wrong, I just don't see why, for now with single-threaded games, this idea wasn't implemented. Probably because no one in their right mind thought with multi-core cpu's that things would remain single-threadded. I guess it might get to the point where a video card will be similar to a motherboard--you can "trade up" GPU and RAM for future upgrades. Nonetheless, thanks for the response and the discussion.

approach assumes single threading, that world is already gone. Photoshop, as I recall, is already multithreaded. So is Sony Vegas which even supports multiple computers for parceling out rendering tasks. Especially, as multicore computers come on the market, more and more applications will take advantage of the hardware.

As far as sharing main memory, I don't see it happening. Systems are always struggling for enough memory, and that will not change. As more work gets done, more memory will be needed. Also, dynamically sharing memory would probably require hardware and OS changes to implement. I simply don't see that happening. Perhaps, on a dedicated gaming machine the things you want will someday be implemented.

Good luck.