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

Same old.

[sam991]

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.

Re:Same old.

[TrisexualPuppy]

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.

Correct. Intel still has the lion's share of the market, and they want to keep it that way. It's interesting how they "cheat" and lock two dies together and call it dual-core or quad-core just to come out with the technology "first" to keep the investors happy.

AMD is smaller obviously, so it has fewer resources...but with those Alpha scientists, they're going to keep going strongly. It's just a matter of time with business directives like this before AMD takes over. They've been having some really cool ideas...and a few more over a few years, the innovators may win. And no, I'm not an AMD fanboi, but I have talked to some architects from IBM and Intel, and they do concur.

Re:Free Enterprise

[Moridineas]

Like if there were hypothetical competitive operating systems like Mac OSX, Linux (and the competition therein--Ubuntu, Fedora, etc), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc?

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:hyper transport

[ZachPruckowski]

FSB 1333 (333 QDR) seems to be holding up well for 4 cores at the moment. It only really seems to be much of an issue in the 4+ socket world (which is admittedly lucrative). You are correct in the sense that Intel stands to gain from a move to a hypertransport-like system, but that only raises the counter-issue: If Intel has the performance lead now, even with the FSB issues, then AMD's 07-08 products have to hit it out of the park to beat Intel's chips without that handicap.

The real issue is feature size. AMD is hurt badly by being consistently behind on that. Intel's been at 65 nm for a while now, and AMD is only now releasing 65 nm parts. Intel will be at 45 nm in some lines by this time next year, while AMD is a year behind them. Feature size brings with it higher yields (more chips per wafer) once you work the kinks out, lower heat, and more transistors per chip. That's the game winner right there, unless one of them shoots themselves in the foot again, like Netburst.

Re:Integrated graphics..

[SQL Error]

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.

Re:Integrated graphics..

[CAIMLAS]

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?

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.

Hybrid Graphics & the Cell roadmap.

[lightversusdark]

The article is a bit light on detail, there's a webcast of the presentation on AMD's Investor Relations site (needs a login (BugMeNot doesn't work) and it's WMP or Real only. And it's apparently four hours long.
The most interesting thing for me was the mention of "Hybrid Graphics":

According to AMD, notebooks with hybrid graphics will include both discrete and integrated graphics processors. When such notebooks are unplugged, their integrated graphics will kick in and disable the discrete GPU. As soon as the notebook is plugged back into a power source, the discrete GPU will be switched on again, apparently without the need to reboot. AMD says this technology will enable notebooks to provide the "best of both worlds" in terms of performance and battery life.

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.

Cue :

[CODiNE]

20 people asking "Why would anyone need this?"
50 people replying "I encode video"
45 people replying "Games"
10 replying "Babes of course"
1 karma whore incapable of making a decent top 10 list. :)

Re:Free Enterprise

[Magic5Ball]

That would make NetBSD the most competetive operating system ever!