AMD's Fusion Processor Combines CPU and GPU

ElectricSteve writes "At Computex 2010 AMD gave the first public demonstration of its Fusion processor, which combines the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on a single chip. The AMD Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units not only adds another acronym to the computer lexicon, but ushers is what AMD says is a significant shift in processor architecture and capabilities. Many of the improvements stem from eliminating the chip-to-chip linkage that adds latency to memory operations and consumes power — moving electrons across a chip takes less energy than moving these same electrons between two chips. The co-location of all key elements on one chip also allows a holistic approach to power management of the APU. Various parts of the chip can be powered up or down depending on workloads."

Comments

Enough with hyping eye candy

[sco08y]

“Hundreds of millions of us now create, interact with, and share intensely visual digital content,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Product Group. “This explosion in multimedia requires new applications and new ways to manage and manipulate data."

So people watch video and play video games, and it's still kinda pokey at times. We're way past diminishing marginal returns on improving graphical interfaces.

I bring it up, because if you're trying to promote a technology that actually uses a computer to compute, you know, work with actual data, you are perpetually sidetracked by trying to make it look pretty to get any attention.

Case in point: working on a project to track trends over financial data, there were several contractors competing. One had this software that tried to glom everything into a node and vector graph, which looked really pretty, but didn't actually do anything to analyze the data.

But to managers, all they see is that those guys have pretty graphs in their demos and all we had was our research into the actual data... all those boring details.

Re:Enough with hyping eye candy

[Deliveranc3]

|"Hundreds of millions of us now create, interact with, and share intensely visual digital content," said Rick
|Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Product Group. "This explosion in multimedia requires
|new applications and new ways to manage and manipulate data."

So people watch video and play video games, and it's still kinda pokey at times. We're way past diminishing marginal returns on improving graphical interfaces.

Well sure YOU DO, but your Gran still has a 5200 with "Turbo memory" (actually that's only 3 years old, she probably has worse). This will be the equivalent of putting audio on the motherboard, a low baseline quality but done with no cost.

I bring it up, because if you're trying to promote a technology that actually uses a computer to compute, you know, work with actual data, you are perpetually sidetracked by trying to make it look pretty to get any attention.

Bloat is indeed a big problem, programs are exploding into GIGABYTE sizes, which is insane. OTOH linux reusing libraries seems not to have worked. There is too little abstraction of the data so each coder writes their own linked list, red-black tree, or whatever algorithm instead of just using the methods from the OS.

Case in point: working on a project to track trends over financial data, there were several contractors competing. One had this software that tried to glom everything into a node and vector graph, which looked really pretty, but didn't actually do anything to analyze the data.

Sounds like a case of "not wanting to throw the baby out with the bathwater." If they have someone of moderate intelligence on staff, that person can find a way to pull useful information out of junk data. He/she will resist removing seemingly useless data, because they occasionally use it and routinely ignore it. A pretty presentation can also be very important in terms of usability, remember you have to look at the underlying code but the user has to look at the GUI, often for hours a day.

But to managers, all they see is that those guys have pretty graphs in their demos and all we had was our research into the actual data... all those boring details. I can't comment on the quality of your management, but once again don't underestimate ease of use or even perceived ease of use (consider how long you will remain trying to learn a new tool if frustrated, the perception that something is as easy as possible is a huge boon... think iCrap).
Anyway back to Fusion, this is EXACTLY what Dell wants, bit lower power, less heat, significantly lower price and a baseline for their users to be able to run Vista/7 (7 review: better than Vista, don't switch from XP). So while it's true that this chip won't be dominant under ANY metric, and would therefore seem to have no customer base it's attractiveness to retail is such, that they will shove it down consumer throats and AMD will reap the rewards.

I'm curious about these things in small form factor, now that SD cards/MicroSD cards have given us nano-size storage we can get back to Finger sized computers that attach to a TV.

SFF Fusion for me!

Re:vs Larrabee

[Rockoon]

AMDs product is just a desperate attempt at trying to be relevant. They need to show they have a product competing with the big boys in all the right channels.

AMD is plenty relevant. It is Intel that scrambled to put out a 6 core desktop processor, which was so poorly planned that the cheap version is $1000. Meanwhile nVidia is desperately trying to get people locked into their CUDA API because their video cards just dont bang the performance drum like they used to.

AMD and Intel have different visions. AMD is clearly focusing on getting more cores on chip for more raw parallel performance (12 core CPU's in 4 chip configs are owning the top end server market.. brought to you by AMD), while Intel is clearly trying to maximize memory bandwidth to peak out raw single threaded performance (triple channel ram and larger cache is owning the software rendering and gaming markets)

Normal people are within the $50 to $200 CPU range, and at those price points, solutions from both camps perform about the same. On the video card front, you just can't beat AMD right now. Best price/performance ratio on top of best performance period.

Re:heat

[sznupi]

AMD chipsets with integrated GFX were quite good at power consumption already; using a dozen or so watts. Considering AMD puts out quadcores with sub 100W TDP, Fusion shouldn't be that big a problem.

Re:This has nothing to do with virtualisztie.

[MikeFM]

Sure you can offload GPU work so long as the entire process is handled by the server and just streaming the result to the client. I've seen this done over the Internet besides on a LAN. It'd be different if it were trying to use the client CPU and memory to drive the GPU.

They specifically were pointing out the benefit to having the GPU and CPU on the same chip which is quite a bit different than a mobo integrated solution. It probably isn't as powerful as a Xeon quad-core processor and a $500 video card but the question is how well it is setup to handle many different GPU tasks. I'd at least assume it's quite a bit faster for these types of tasks than a standard CPU and I wonder how well they can scale the technology for a better CPU and GPU.

I'm not sure I agree it's a niche market. I'd say more of a market poised to explode when the right products make it attainable. For virtualization it's more important that it can handle several unrelated tasks at a reasonable speed than that it can handle a single task at a high speed. If each CPU core also had a paired GPU it'd open up possibilities. Bulk, power consumption, and heat are often as big of issues for server farms as for laptops which is another reason why an interpreted GPU might be of interest.

Grid computing uses goes hand in hand with virtualization. Again coming down to how well these can work in parallel. Being able to fit a number of CPU and GPU cores on a single physical chip could be very beneficial I think.

Re:vs Larrabee

[mcelrath]

AMD and Intel need to have a contest on the shittiest driver category. I have one of each. Each revision of xserver-xorg-video-intel bricks my laptop in a new and exciting way. And AMD's fglrx is a steaming pile of rendering errors, inconsistent performance, and crashes.

On the other hand, both Intel and AMD have released specs and participate in open source development. So in the long run, either one is a better choice than NVidia. So I'll continue to complain about them and submit bug reports. It's the open source way.

Re:What about memory?

[Rockoon]

while this little thing will have to share the memory access and caches with CPU.

Sharing the cache is not necessarily a bad thing. Its nice when the data that the CPU now needs is already sitting in L1 because the GPU just computed it, or vise-versa. That was, in fact, the point of the poster.