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AMD: It's Time To Open Up the GPU (gpuopen.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD has called for the opening up of GPU technology to developers. Nicolas Thibieroz, a senior engineering manager for the company, announced today the launch of GPUOpen, its initiative to provide code and documentation to PC developers, embracing open source and collaborative development with the community. He says, "Console games often tap into low-level GPU features that may not be exposed on PC at the same level of functionality, causing different — and usually less efficient — code paths to be implemented on PC instead. Worse, proprietary libraries or tools chains with "black box" APIs prevent developers from accessing the code for maintenance, porting or optimizations purposes. Game development on PC needs to scale to multiple quality levels, including vastly different screen resolutions." And here's how AMD wants to solve this: "Full and flexible access to the source of tools, libraries and effects is a key pillar of the GPUOpen philosophy. Only through open source access are developers able to modify, optimize, fix, port and learn from software. The goal? Encouraging innovation and the development of amazing graphics techniques and optimizations in PC games." They've begun by posting several technical articles to help developers understand and use various tools, and they say more content will arrive soon.
This has nothing to do with Intel and everything to do with getting people to adopt AMD's open standards over NVIDIA's closed standards, which is actually better for the health of the industry as a whole. What is it you expect Intel to sign up for? Their graphics products are garbage and absolutely nobody wants to use them.
Translation: quit optimizing for proprietary Intel technology
This is not targeted at Intel. It is targeted at NVidia. They are looking to the future when GPGPU is expected to be a bigger slice of the GPU market. NVidia currently dominates with their (proprietary) CUDA interface, while AMD relies on the less efficient OpenCL. More openness will help AMD (and Intel) while working against NVidia.
In almost all markets the dominant company will prefer to push their proprietary solution, while companies with smaller market shares will push openness.
It's aimed at Nvidia, not Intel, and it's all about hair.
Or rather, it's all about Nvidia GameWorks, which got a lot of attention this year thanks to a number of bleeding-edge games, most notably The Witcher 3.
The horribly over-simplified tl;dr version is that Nvidia have been encouraging PC developers to use a set of closed-and-proprietary tools, which allow for some remarkably pretty in-game effects but more or less screw over AMD cards.
This, combined with the fact that Nvidia has, in general, better driver support, quieter and more power-efficient cards and, at the top end of the market, better single-card performance, has put AMD into a pretty bad place in the PC graphics card market right now. Yes, they still tend to have a slight price-to-power ratio advantage, but the quality of life drawbacks to an AMD card, combined with the GameWorks effect, has driven down their market share and, right now, makes it hard to recommend an AMD card.
There are no "goodies" or "baddies" here. Nvidia's GameWorks strategy is undoubtedly fairly dubious in terms of its ethics. At the same time, they are putting out better (and more power-efficient, so also on one level more environmentally friendly) cards (and the GameWorks effects can be VERY pretty), while AMD continues to put out cards that burn with the heat of a million fiery suns and have long-standing, unaddressed issues with their driver support.
Hey, AMD, show us your new CPUs for 2016. Everything you got now is long in the tooth.
How right you are. But their basic problem has been that they were still stuck on old semiconductor fabrication processes. Intel has spent a bunch of money on fab technology and is about two generations ahead of AMD. It didn't help that their current architecture isn't great.
I'm not a semiconductor expert, but as I understand it: the thinner the traces on the semiconductor, the higher clock rate can go or the lower the power dissipation can be (those two are tradeoffs). Intel's 4th-generation CPUs were fabbed on 22 nm process, and their current CPUs are fabbed on 14 nm process. AMD has been stuck at 28 nm and is in fact still selling CPUs fabbed on a 32 nm process. It's brutal to try to compete when so far behind. But AMD is just skipping the 22 nm process and going straight to 14 nm. (Intel has 10 nm in the pipeline, planned for 2017 release, but it should be easier to compete 14 nm vs 10 nm than 32/28 nm vs 14 nm! And it took years for AMD to get to 14 nm, while there are indications that they will make the jump to 10 nm more quickly.)
But AMD is about to catch up. AMD has shown us their new CPU for 2016; its code-name is "Zen" and it will be fabbed on a 14 nm process. AMD claims the new architecture will provide 40% more instructions-per-clock than their current architecture; combined with finally getting onto a modern fab process, the Zen should be competitive with Intel's offerings. (I expect Intel to hold onto the top-performance crown, but I expect AMD will offer better performance per dollar with acceptable thermal envelope.) Wikipedia says it will be released in October 2016.
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing-components/processors/amd-confirms-powerhouse-zen-cpus-will-arrive-for-high-end-pcs-in-2016-1310980
Intel is so far ahead of AMD that it's unlikely that AMD will ever take over the #1 spot, but I am at least hoping that they will hold on to a niche and serve to keep Intel in check.
The ironic thing is that Intel is currently making the best products, yet still they feel the need to cheat with dirty tricks like the Intel C Compiler's generating bad code for CPUs with a non-Intel CPUID. Also I don't like how Intel tries to segment their products into dozens of tiers to maximize money extraction. (Oh, did you want virtualization? This cheaper CPU doesn't offer that; buy this more expensive one. Oh, did you want ECC RAM? Step right up to our most expensive CPUs!)
Intel has been a very good "corporate citizen" with respect to the Linux kernel, and they make good products; but I try not to buy their products because I hate their bad behavior. I own one laptop with an Intel i7 CPU, but otherwise I'm 100% non-Intel.
I want to build a new computer and I don't want to wait for Zen so I will be buying an FX-8350 (fabbed on 32 nm process, ugh). But in 18 months or so I look forward to buying new Zen processors and building new computers.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
except they actually have opened up their technology, and very often they've opened up NEW technology. from AMD64, to HT link to their GPU specs (resulting in open source AMD drivers rivaling the propitiatory drivers in speed, and being MILES ahead of nvidia's open source drivers (which don't even have support for ANY 9xx series cards yet)).
tressFX is going to release 3.0 soon, mantle formed the basis for vulkan and now we get openGPU.