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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."
Intel pushes the 'more power! faster!' philosophy while AMD just redesigns the architecture and it takes Intel a few years to catch up. Not much has changed since 2000.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
Like if there were hypothetical competitive operating systems like Mac OSX, Linux (and the competition therein--Ubuntu, Fedora, etc), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc?
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
Is the current generation of CPU not optimized for mathematic operations?
What do want to run on a computer that isn't "mathematic operations"?
More specifically:
Are current CPUs optimised for physics simulations? No.
For image processing? No.
For data compression? No.
For encryption? No.
These are all areas where custom cores can provide enormous performance benefits (both in absolute terms, and in terms of performance per watt) over current CPUs, which are general purpose.
Imagine a processor with special circuitry routines which will speed up the operation of the following by a significant percent:
- database servers
- web servers
- CAD and 3d programs (rendering)
Basically, it's not much different than MMX or any other extension to a processor. The programmers can still code for the x86 (or whatever) architecture and the same operating system, but then shortcut those instructions when the additional instructions are found to be available. Or maybe they can work it transparently so programmers don't have to do anything additional - it'll optimize on the fly (provided they can figure out how to do that). Overall, I think the software headache will be worth it to companies, as they will be able to have substantial gains in performance in the hardware department, cutting cost while gaining performance. What datacenter wouldn't love to use half as many machines to provide access to the same amount of information; what animator wouldn't love to have their workstation be able to render things at twice the speed?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
What I'd like to see is a couple of those field-programmable thingie cores that can reconfigure their circuits to a specialized calculation a program is doing... Wishful thinking but still...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The most interesting thing for me was the mention of "Hybrid Graphics":It also looks like they're also extending the Fusion concept along Cell-like lines, with additional cores for non CPU or GPU purposes.
Their road map through 2008 only talks about up to quad core, although I assume this means CPU cores (I'm not sure that I would accept a CPU+GPU on a single die branded as a 'dual-core' chip). I think the Cell has eight cores, but due to yield issues not all are enabled in a PS3, and they are not all functionally equivalent. I don't know if this is the case for the Cell-based IBM blades, though.
The roadmap basically looks like periodic refreshing of the product line reducing power consumption with each iteration, which is where I think Intel have got a head-start on AMD. However, if AMD can sort out the yield issues, and compilers and developers begin to take advantage of these "associate" cores in Cell and future AMD architectures, then maybe Intel will have turned out to have missed a trick, as they did with x86-64.
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle
20 people asking "Why would anyone need this?" :)
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1 karma whore incapable of making a decent top 10 list.
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Of course, for the competition of the type that exists between Intel and AMD or AMD/Nvidia you need a common standard to compete with. If all apps ran on the same OS/GUI API then you'd have a true choice in operating systems (this one is more secure, this one faster, this one runs Word twice as fast and handles more DB load, etc). CPUs have x86, GPUs have DirectX/OpenGL, OSs need a standard application interface commmonly accepted by software developers. Otherwise you're comparing not just the OS but all the stuff that goes with it (skins, music players, etc etc etc)
Compaq used to sell those; they're called transputers and came as a PCI card with 4 FPGAs, some RAM, and a PowerPC CPU.
That would make NetBSD the most competetive operating system ever!
There are 1.1... kinds of people.