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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."
I'm hoping moving things into the CPU will make it easier to take advantage of the huge parallel architecture of modern GPUs.
For what, you ask?
I'm personally interested in sound synthesis. I play the piano, and while you can get huge sample libraries (> 10 GB), they're not realistic enough when it comes to the dynamics.
Instead people have been researching physical models of the piano. So you simulate a piano in software, or the main components of it, and extract the sound from that. Nowadays there are even commercial offerings, like Pianoteq (www.pianoteq.com) and Roland's V-Piano. Problem is that while this improves dynamics dramatically, they're not accurate enough yet to produce a fully convincing tone.
I think that's partly because nobody understands how to model the piano fully yet, at least judging from the research literature I've read, but also very much because even a modern CPU simply can't deliver enough FLOPS.
| This will be the equivalent of putting audio on the motherboard, a low baseline quality but done with no cost.
I don't think you are viewing this correctly. I wish they didn't call it a GPU because your thought on the matter is what people are going to think of first. Instead think of it as the Fusion between a normal threaded CPU and a massively parallel processing unit. This thing is going to smoke current CPUs in things like physic operations without the need of anything like CUDA and without the performance limit of the PCIe bus. The biggest problem with discrete cards is pulling data off the cards because the PCIe bus is only fast in one direction (data into the card). This thing is going to be clocked much higher then discrete cards in addition to having direct access to the memory controller.
I don't think many have even scratched the surface of what a PPU (Parallel Processing Unit) can do or how it can improve the quality of just about any application ... I think this is going to be Hott.