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AMD Fusion System Architecture Detailed
Vigile writes "At the first AMD Fusion Developer Summit near Seattle this week, AMD revealed quite a bit of information about its next-generation GPU architecture and the eventual goals it has for the CPU/GPU combinations known as APUs. The company is finally moving away from a VLIW architecture and instead is integrating a vector+scalar design that allows for higher utilization of compute units and easier hardware scheduling. AMD laid out a 3-year plan to offer features like unified address space and fully coherent memory for the CPU and GPU that have the potential to dramatically alter current programming models. We will start seeing these features in GPUs released later in 2011."
Whats wrong with hardware !
Humans are too stupid to program it.
Not sure want the fix is not hardware keeps exploding and we are stuck with Windows 7, lol 8 or (CAT), lol Lion.
..and intel with either buy nvidia, or attempt to do the same thing, I'm betting on the former.
Is that the modular nature of current components allows for relatively easy upgrading and a comparatively low cost. Buying a new graphics card that has the price of a GPU and dedicated video RAM is reasonable. Having to buy a new CPU every time you want to upgrade your GPU could get unreasonably expensive fast.
One concern of mine is simply performance with unified memory. The reason is that memory bandwidth is a big factor in 3D performance. The kind of math you have to do just needs a shitload of memory access. This is why GPUs have such insane memory configurations. They have massively wide controllers, special high performance ram (GDDR5 is based on DDR3, but higher performance) and so on. That's wonderful, but also expensive.
So it seems to me that you run in to a situation where either you are talking about needing to have much more expensive memory for a computer, possibly with additional constraints (at high speeds memory on a stick isn't feasible, electrical issues are such that you have to solder it to the board) or a system where your performance suffers because it is starved for memory bandwidth. Please remember that it would also have to share memory with the CPU.
Perhaps they've found a way to overcome this, but I'm skeptical.
I also worry this could lead to fragmentation of the market. What I mean is right now we have a pretty nice unified situation from a developer perspective. AMD and Intel have all kinds of cross licensing agreements with regards to instruction sets. So the instructions for one are the instructions for the other. While there are special cases, like 3DNow that only AMD does, or AVX which Intel has and AMD has yet to implement, by and large you have no problems supporting both with a very similar, or dead identical, codebase.
Likewise GPUs are unified from an app perspective. You talk to them with DirectX or OpenGL. The details of how AMD or nVidia do things aren't so important, that handled. You use one interface to talk to whatever card the user has. Not saying there can't be issues, but by and large it is the same deal.
Well this could change that. APUs might need a drastically different development structure. Ok fine, except AMD might be the only company that has them. Intel doesn't seem to be going down this road right now, and nVidia doesn't have a CPU division. So then as a developer you could have a problem where something that works well for traditional CPU/GPU doesn't work well, or maybe at all, for an APU.
That could lead to a choice of three situations, none that good:
1) You develop for traditional architectures. That's great for the majority of people, who are Intel owners (and people who own what is now current AMD stuff) but screws over this new, perhaps better, way of doing things.
2) You develop for the APU. That is nice for the people who have it but it screws over the mass market.
3) You develop two versions, one for each. Everyone is happy but your costs go way up from having more to maintain.
Of course even if everything goes APU it could be problematic if AMD and Intel have very different ways of doing things. Their cross licensing does not extend to this sort of thing, and I could see them deciding to try and fight it out.
So neat idea, but I'm not really sure it is a good one at this point.
I think it will be great to buy a reasonably priced laptop knowing later I can upgrade the cpu and doing so will upgrade the graphics chip at same time! so 3-5 years down the line a simple upgrade may breath new life into the thing assuming faster chips will be available within the same thermal scope.
... and congratulated AMD for redescovering sgi's O2 Unified memory Architecture..
PS: IBM PC jr. (1984) & Commodore Amiga (1985) were actually the 1st one to use UMA. Could this mean we will have "Chip RAM" & "Fast RAM" again ? :)
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Intel doesn't seem to be going down this road right now
What about the GPU equipped Sandy Bridge CPU's Intel have out now and did have out before Fusion APU's were on the market?
But how good will the new architecture be for processing Bitcoin blocks?
That's why some of AMD's current high-end GPUs are hard to find.
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Does it have WebGL support? i.e., address space protection and preemption support/kernel mode for shader programs?
Maybe someone read the TFA could chime in. The TFS mentioned unified address space, but not necessarily unified memory access right? it could be just another virtual memory paging mechanism....
Will it run Linux?
I'm not being facetious, I got stung by the lack of support by Nvidia for their Optimus graphics cards on my ASUS U30JC.
Thankfully Martin Juhl has been working on a solution using VirtualGL, which gives us the use of our Nvidia cards under linux
To quote AnandTech, "On average the A8-3850 [GPU] is 58% faster than the Core i5 2500K [GPU]. If we look at peak performance in games like Modern Warfare 2, Llano delivers over twice the frame rate of Sandy Bridge. This is what processor graphics should look like.
This is comparing AMD's flagship APU @ $170 vs Intels mid-range Sandy @ $220.
The road Intel is going down is the same road its always gone down. Delivering sub-par graphics performance to a crowd that isnt going to notice.
"His name was James Damore."
Intel GPU technology is so far behind AMD/ATI and NVIDIA, it makes sense that it has not drawn as much attention. The graphics side of Fusion is far more advanced than the integrated graphics we have seen on motherboards to this point as well.
A "math coprocessor" is just the FPU (Floating Point Unit) of a particular era of microcomputers. The FPU implements machine instructions for floating point math. Before the microcomputer, when machines filled cabinets, you might have an FPU (on one or more circuit boards), you might not. Same with the early micros. Eventually they built the FPU into the same die as the CPU, so no need for a separate chip. The FPU is always tightly coupled to the CPU because it shares the same control unit as the CPU. (A CPU consists of a control unit plus an arithmetic/logic unit.) You can't change the design of one without changing the other.
A GPU is different from an FPU. It doesn't process CPU instructions -- it has its own control unit. GPUs operate independently of the CPU.
Building a CPU into the same die or IC package as the CPU won't prevent you from installing a discrete graphics card. No need to get all upset about it.
Although the tech may eventually get to the point where you won't bother with a discrete graphics card. I suspect we'll eventually see a large package containing CPU, GPU and memory, for performance reasons. One will upgrade them all together.
Before you panic about that: In the early days of minicomputers, CPUs were implemented as many boards containing lots of discrete logic and small scale integration. It was possible to do things like change how the adder was implemented, how memory was accessed, or add whole new machine instructions. You could "upgrade" at that level. That capability was lost with the move to (very) large scale integration. However, things are so much cheaper and faster with (V)LSI that it's worth it.
So if $100 will bring you a new CPU, GPU, and RAM, running 10x faster than what you had before, then yah, I can see it happening, and being a win.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Intel GPUs only really target the lowend, they are pretty weak compared to the offerings from ATI/AMD and nVidia...
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Step 1: invent chip that does "x". Step 2: "x" chip now asked to do "y" task. Step 3: Kludge together ways to accelerate "x" chip doing "y" task. Step 4: invent "y" chip to sit next to "x". Step 5: combine "x" and "y" chip into "z" chip.
Rinse
Repeat
well CAD and useing the GPU as a CPU is still there. OpenCL makes the video card in to a HIGH end FPU the can do stuff that the main cpu sucks at.
Any ways a video card still has faster ram that is not used shared with system ram. On board video on some boards has a max of 2 displays (some boards force one to be analog) Now if ATI / AMD can have on board video with DP then you can do more. But I think if you need like 3-4+ screens a add in video card may be better and save you the ram hit.
but better video at a lower cost is something to keep in mine.
Apple better look out a low end mini with i3 and on board video at $700+ will be a joke next to what AMD will have + it will have like 8-16 unused pci-e lanes. Apple better have a video chip in it on x8 pci-e and 2 TB ports on the other x8 pci-e.
Lot's of laptops have CPU sockets not the apple ones but lot's of other ones.
The Mac Mini uses an nVidia 320M, which benchmarks at about half of the AMD 6550 Llano.
"His name was James Damore."
Believe it or not, Making a chip the size of a football field isn't really the best idea.
How much poo would APU poo, if APU could poo poo?
-- Apu from the Simpsons
Does this Fusion APU multitask so that it can run 2 or more kernels at once (with no worries of the watchdog kicking in and stopping >5 sec kernels) ?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
According to Anand's reviews, the GPU on current Llano APUs is extremely bandwidth limited. Llano feels like a testbed product to me, like a sort of beta moved out into production as proof of concept (and AMD's pre-release demo of the next-gen Trinity kind of confirms that). The CPU is pretty weak; apparently the highest-end A8 APU is JUST competitive with the old i5 520M. Graphically, though, it kicks 31 flavors of crap out of anything not a $100+ discrete GPU. It's also apparently extremely energy-efficient.
If AMD were smart they'd make LV versions of these and have them compete with the i3 and the LV i* parts from intel in the thin and light market. Imagine a 12" machine with the ULV equivalent of the high-end A8 APU and a 1600x900 screen at, say, a $450 price point. This would absolutely MURDER intel in that entire market segment.
but now apple will be locked into intel video with the new intel cpus if they don't add in a video chip.
It was called the Commodore Amiga.
After RTFA this architecture actually seems like it could be a pleasure to program for, but I enjoy manipulating low-level processes and controlling all modules I use.
Anyone else notice the similarity between Llano's and Arrandale's memory controller configuration, i.e., that both put the MC on the GPU and have the CPU talk to the GPU via some protocol for data? Okay, in Llano's case there's the option of going directly to memory through WCs but still.
And then, this FSA crap seems to be going in the direction of Sandy Bridge, i.e., a unified L3 cache... as much as I like AMD, they do seem like their following in Intel's footsteps. This new architecture reminds me a little of Larabee. Not that I know much about either, but IIRC in Demers' keynote he mentioned something like 24 CUs per chip... which seems way too low, I must have heard him wrong or there must be a factor of 40 or so I'm missing somewhere...