AMD Launches Partnership With CAD Developer PTC

MojoKid writes "AMD is kicking off its weekend with news of a partnership between itself and CAD software developer PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation). PTC owns and develops the Creo software family. One of the programs at the heart of the company, Creo Element/Pro, was originally known as Pro/ENGINEER. It's not at all unusual for software developers in the CAD/CAM space to ally with hardware manufacturers, but it's typically Nvidia, not AMD, making such announcements. AMD claims that the upcoming Creo 2.0 product suite will be able to take advantage of the GPU in unprecedented ways that simultaneously improve performance and visual quality without compromising either. The company calls one such option Order Independent Transparency, or OIT. OIT is a rendering technology that allows for the partial display of wireframes and models inside a solid surface without creating artifacts or imprecise visualizations."

Comments

Re:/vertisement. Nothing to see here.

[hairyfeet]

While the announcement in and of itself isn't that big a whoop it does bring up a more interesting question: Which will be more important in the future, the CPU or the GPU?

As we have seen with the Brazos platform as well as liano (I believe bulldozer is a server chip they tried to push into a consumer market that it simply wasn't designed for because they needed product) it appears that AMD believes it is the GPU that will be of primary importance. As someone who deals with consumers 6 days a week I can see their reasoning, as more and more of my customers are more concerned with multimedia than raw number crunching and lets face it after dual cores PCs became "good enough" for the uses that the average consumer has. i have built several E350 based units for office as well as home and the extremely low power while having "good enough" CPU and hardware accelerated video does make for a nice platform. As we have read the next push from AMD will be switching the GPU from VLIW to vector based which since it will be built into the core would allow the GPU to behave as a "super floating point" thus meaning the CPU can be even simpler

Then you have the Intel stance which is to pare what they consider a "good enough" GPU with a high performance CPU. this design too has merits as if you have a powerful enough CPU then what the GPU does can often be done by the CPU instead. There is also the question of how much pure number crunching can be done on the GPU VS the CPU as it will take time to learn how to program for the GPU (although OpenCL may help in this regard) whereas the CPU is known by developers and thus easier to program for.

So I'd say that is an interesting question, whether to go for the power in the GPU or in the CPU. Using myself and my customers I'd say AMD has a good strategy for the consumer market whereas Intel has a good strategy for the business. After all Suzy the checkout girl isn't manipulating huge spreadsheets or dealing in large databases but there are plenty of business uses for having serious number crunching ability. I could easily see the split happening along those lines, with the consumer units, be it netbook/nettop, laptop, or desktop being AMD while the workstations and business laptops belong to Intel but i think it will be interesting in the next few years to see how it shapes up.

I will say whomever at AMD killed the Phenom/Athlon lines was an idiot and should get a good firing, the BD design simply isn't good for the consumer, its too expensive with frankly less bang for the buck than the Thuban and Deneb chips which often curb stomp it in all but its highest SKU and its pretty obvious that while its a good server design (as integer heavy highly threaded loads are more prevalent there) its simply not a good deal for consumers. I would have stuck with Bobcat on mobile, maybe adding a 4 core version for the more midrange machines, and kept Thuban (since it can fit everything that used to be covered by Phenom/Athlon simply by flipping off cores and/or cache which also made it a more attractive target for those who wished to try turning on disabled cores) and waited to see if integrating a vector based GPU would bring the increased performance to replace Thuban.

But in either case the next couple of years should be interesting as we see which strategy pays off and for which markets.

Re:OpenGL

[Daniel Phillips]

CAD IS THE REASON LINUX GAMING DOES NOT EXIST.

Absolute nonsense. CAD is the engine that kept OpenGL going through the years of vicious attacks by Microsoft. Even though Microsoft achieved near absolute victory in the gaming space and played an instrumental role in bringing SGI to its knees, it failed to kill OpenGL entirely, in large part because of the entrenched high end CAD market. While most CAD vendors did port their systems from Unix to Windows in the late 90's, they had little interest in porting to Direct3D. Microsoft was therefore prevented from undermining OpenGL on Windows by their usual techniques such as playing games with the driver APIs. During this period, Linux took over Hollywood's render farms from Unix, and that was another base of support for OpenGL, but it might not have been sufficient if Microsoft had ever succeeded in dislodging the tenacious grip of OpenGL on Windows-based CAD. And then there was John Carmack's famous refusal to switch to Direct3D, but that came close to the brink. Not any more.

In my opinion, the greatest threat to OpenGL ever was the noisy faction of game developers pushing for a complete break with compatibility for OpenGL 3.0 (I doubt very much that John Carmack was ever one of those, despite his well founded criticisms). In retrospect it was proved that OpenGL could achieve parity with Direct3D and more, without breaking compatibility. And now OpenGL basically owns the entire gaming universe except for the steadily shrinking part over which Microsoft is able to exercise monopoly control.

Well, and Linux gaming does exist, just not at the level where we can throw away our consoles quite yet. But that day is coming.

One can fairly ask, why is the Linux game market, with millions of potential customers, not already well served by the likes of EA and Activision? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think you do either. It very definitely has nothing to do with the influence of CAD vendors on OpenGL. I tend to suspect the hidden hand of Microsoft, however I do not have firm evidence of that. And furthermore I don't care, because it is the very failure of the big publishers to serve the Linux market that has accelerated the rise of a vibrant and rapidly growing community of free and open content developers on Linux. I sincerely hope the big publishers continue to keep their heads up their proverbial colons forever, because it does our community nothing but good in the long run.