AMD Reveals Plans to Move Beyond the Core Race

J. Dzhugashvili writes "The Tech Report has caught wind of AMD's plans for processors over the coming years. Intel may be counting on cramming 'tens to hundreds' of cores in future CPUs, but AMD thinks the core race is just a repeat of the megahertz race that took place a few years ago. Instead, AMD is counting on Accelerated Processing Units, chips that mix and match general-purpose CPU cores with dedicated application processors for graphics and other tasks. In the meantime, AMD is cooking up some new desktop and mobile processors that it hopes will give Intel a run for its money."

Comments

hyper transport

[Joe The Dragon]

Intel would be better off if they where to start useing hyper transport Even having two cores on same die with linked by hyper transport to each other with one link to the chip set is better then 2 cores shearing the FSB.

What is the point of having 32 cores with only one link to the chip

Even with the new Xeon's there still only one link per cpu and the cpus need to use it to get to ram

Amd chips right now have up to 3 newer ones will have up to 5 links

Re:Dedicated processors for "other" tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget crypto, the hardware AES on a 1GHz VIA C3 runs circles around a A64 X2 4800+ doing the same in software, at something like 10 vs. 80W power consumption.

Transputer

[temojen]

Compaq used to sell those; they're called transputers and came as a PCI card with 4 FPGAs, some RAM, and a PowerPC CPU.

Re:Same old.

[Martin Blank]

To be fair, the Merom architecture is a true dual-core architecture. The "quad-core" chip that Intel announced recently is simply glued together, and AMD's recent split design isn't terribly much better (though the two cores are linked by a dedicated datalink). AMD has a true quad-core design being prepped for next year, and Intel may have to follow suit, especially if AMD is able to show a decisive performance edge.