Perhaps, when talking in your linked articles about how all these apps now run on the GPU instead of the CPU, you should ask Intel for how many DECADES this has been true or mostly true already? This is nothing new. It’s not in any way a change from 5+ years ago. As long ago as Windows 3.1 (hint: that was in the early 1990’s) we had hardware acceleration for window-drawing primitives to support these kinds of apps.

Just looking at the report you reference, the growth came, basically, entirely from Notebooks. Nothing to do with “3D web”. That could be notebooks that previously shipped without GPUs being shipped with GPUs. Or maybe it’s that Notebook sales have increased hugely recently? Maybe it’s a direct side-effect of the fact that Apple saw an amazing 20 per cent market share in notebooks during July and August – and that Apple notebooks all have GPUs?

It might be interesting to, you know, look at what has changed that means that notebooks now have GPUs?

Or mabye to look at how much of the observed bump comes from Intel changing the habits of a lifetime and startig to ship notebook GPUs that actually support core computer-games graphics features from 2-3 years ago, instead of only supporting ones from 7-10 years ago (which they have been consistently doing until very recently)?

Or maybe it’s simply that the GPU providers have felt the need to diversify away from the (now saturated) desktop GPU business, and have in the last few years put more of their money into making power-efficient/heat-efficient GPU’s which are finally viable in notebooks? Because again this is a recent change.

Personally, such a massive, sudden, leap strikes me as caused more by a single product / family change than anything else.

So, I’m sorry: this article seems to miss the obvious questions and conclusions entirely. I don’t know what the real causes are, but at least I’m not going around drawing arbitrary conclusions plucked out of thin air that diverge radically from the “most likely” explanations.