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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.
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.
|"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!
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."
| 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.
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.