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AMD Unveils Vega GPU Architecture With 512 Terabytes of Memory Address Space (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD lifted the veil on its next generation GPU architecture, codenamed Vega, this morning. One of the underlying forces behind Vega's design is that conventional GPU architectures have not been scaling well for diverse data types. Gaming and graphics workloads have shown steady progress, but today's GPUs are used for much more than just graphics. In addition, the compute capability of GPUs may have been increasing at a good pace, but memory capacity has not kept up. Vega aims to improve both compute performance and addressable memory capacity, however, through some new technologies not available on any previous-gen architecture. First, is that Vega has the most scalable GPU memory architecture built to date with 512TB of address space. It also has a new geometry pipeline tuned for more performance and better efficiency with over 2X peak throughput per clock, a new Compute Unit design, and a revamped pixel engine. The pixel engine features a new draw stream binning rasterizer (DSBR), which reportedly improves performance and saves power. All told, Vega should offer significant improvements in terms of performance and efficiency when products based on the architecture begin shipping in a few months.
But this is not new at all. IIRC Nvidia's CUDA 5 already gives you 49 bits of unified address space. Don't really know the addressing limitations on previous AMD architectures, but I doubt it was substantially lower.
Realistically, large address spaces when you can only practically fill 0.05-0.1% means little for performance. I don't want to attack AMD with this, who usually manufacture really good GPU hardware, but this sounds like a marketing gimmick and nothing more. I particularly enjoyed the "hours to real-time" comparison... against a CPU.