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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."
“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.
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.
Perhaps you should email your insights the CEO of AMD. I'm sure he'll be grateful for the heads up from some retarded cunt on slashdot that his huge array of engineers and scientists have being building a chip that doesn't work for the past 5 years.
The technical difference is that while your Core i3 has its GPU as a separate die in the same packaging, AMD Fusion has the GPU(s) on the same die as the CPU(s). The Intel approach makes for shorter and faster interconnects, the AMD approach completely removes the interconnects. The main advantage is probably (as is alluded to in the summary) related to power consumption.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
I also heard that they *share* FP math units between CPU and GPU.
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.
"His name was James Damore."
The 6-core Intel processor is the Extreme Edition (always was introduced at $1000), and frankly smokes every other desktop processor out there.
AMD is the value-choice - they're cheaper at the same performance point, but they don't really compete in the over $250 desktop arena.
On the server front, Intel's introduction of Core2 based Xeons allowed it to compete again, and right now AMD is leader only in some cases in server performance (some are draws, but most I think go to Intel). Too bad, as server processors were producing a lot of money for AMD.
Intel is also leader in performance/watt, due to a complex power delivery architecture and better processor production facilities.
Meanwhile, AMD competes where it can on the processor front (but ruled the previous 6 months on the performance graphic front).
Will the drivers for the graphics be open source or will we be crawling out of this proprietary driver hole we have been trying to climb out of for over a decade?
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Also, think of what this means for laptops. First, you save a huge amount of space by not having to have a separate GPU chip on the board. Have you seen how crammed the mainboard is on the macbook? And with the significant improvements in power consumption, it's a win-win for the laptop market.
AMD designed/implemented the 64bit instruction that will be running our desktop PCs for decades to come.
Intel was the one scrambling to catch up on that.
No sig today...
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.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
People who don't know better seem to skimp on the power supplies more than anything else.
I can understand cheap boards; they'll (usually) last the useful life of the system provided they're not really crappy. But the power supply is existential: it's the heart of the system.
If it doesn't pump your electricity properly (at the correct rates and the like), your brain and various peripherals will die a slow death. Sometimes it is not so slow.
Invest in a decent power supply: it's worth it. It's probably the only part of a typical user computer I'd consider an investment, too, because it is an insurance policy (of sorts) on the parts. Buying a cheap power supply so you can get a UPS is backwards. Your components are still going to be getting crap power if the PSU is crap.
I've had a total of one power supply failure, 2 disk failures, and 0 peripheral/RAM/CPU/motherboard failures in the 12 years I've been buying my own parts to build systems.
The current PSU I've got in my main home computer is a Seasonic something or other (they, and Antec, I've found are very good). I'm amazed at how good this converter is: yes, it's got PFC and all those bells, which certainly help, but it delivers amazingly consistent power, evening out the voltage nicely. Hell, we had the power go out for long enough to stop the motor in the washing machine, make my wife's laptop go to battery, and kill the lights, and make my LCD lose power: the computer didn't turn off (and no, I'm not currently using a UPS). This little power supply caches enough power for a full second or so of operation while playing a CPU and graphics intensive game.
So yeah, paying $70 or more for a PSU does not seem unreasonable in the least. With PSUs, you're paying more so for quality than you are for advertised performance or anything like that, so throw down the cash.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
cost - yeah, I can see Intel willingly passing the savings...anyway, cpu + mobo combo hasn't got cheaper at all
...)
This is where Intel's monopolistic behaviour rears its ugly head. In the past, the GPU needed to be integrated on the motherboard. Now it's on the CPU but Intel motherboard chipsets cost the same as previous generations. Seems like a terrific opportunity a market for 3rd party chipset vendors to make an offering (like the good old days when you could choose from VIA, Nvidia, SiS, Intel,
But wait, Intel will no longer allows 3rd parties to produce chipsets for their CPUs and keeps the profits from the artificially inflated chipset market to itself. Intel may have the performance crown, but its reasons like this (and the OEM slush funds to lock out AMD from Dell and other vendors) that keep me from supporting "Chipzilla"
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
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.
"His name was James Damore."