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Changing the Computing Landscape Forever |
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Why GP-GPU May Hurt Intel |
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by Josh Walrath |
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GP-GPU and Why AMD Bought ATI The reasons for AMD acquiring ATI are many, and a lot of them have already been covered. AMD will be able to leverage ATI’s chipset business to augment the CPU business, get their foot into the mobile and TV market, plus the added variety of products ATI offers will provide balance to what AMD has. While these reasons are valid, I think the one overriding reason is in fact the potential of GP-GPU, and how such technology leveraged in the right way could upset the entire industry. We merely have to look at two of AMD’s latest technology releases to see where this is going. The first is Torrenza. AMD is opening up the cache coherency HyperTransport bus to 3rd party members who wish to create “co-processors” that will work hand in hand with Opteron and accelerate computing or special functionality. This will be a dedicated, high speed link that can have its own local memory. IBM, Cray, Fujitsu, and Sun have all signed on to provide parts that will fit in the socket or HTX slot. This of course is of great potential for GPUs. It tightly connects CPUs and GPUs, and while PCI-E will be the connection of choice for years to come in the mainstream market, it does offer the option for this type of graphics integration. When GP-GPU comes into play, this allows a highly complex GPU to be placed beside an Opteron and provide massive floating point performance, all without having to use a large board with expensive local memory and power circuitry. The second and more important announcement is that AMD will release a CPU in 2008 that will have the graphics portion integrated in. At face value this appears to be a cost optimized product that would address the value marketplace. This appears correct, but the true potential of this integrated portion is akin to the first floating point unit integrated into an X86 CPU 20 years ago. AMD will market this as a budget SKU, but we can also bet that there will be a “performance enhanced Opteron” which will use the integrated graphics functionality as a dedicated, high powered, floating point co-processor that can be utilized by a large amount of applications that WILL be ready for it in 2008. This future processor could very well be the next great product for High Performance Computing. The idea of a quad core Opteron processor with an integrated graphics portion which will have at least four to sixteen dedicated floating point units that can be used in stream processor applications has made people around the industry stand up. With all of the other system level advantages AMD currently has over Intel (HyperTransport, Integrated Memory controller, Torrenza initiative, etc.) the ability to leverage the tremendous floating point power of up to 16 shader pipelines for scientific, rendering, and desktop applications is simply stunning. Remember as well that these shader units will be at least DX10 capable, so they will not be divided into pixel and vertex pipelines. When we also realize that these products will be running in the 3 GHz range, the potential throughput of such a co-processor is astounding. Since we are also seeing high quality physics effects in upcoming games that will utilize the floating point potential of GPUs and standalone physics processors, the GPU portion of the upcoming AMD CPU may not in fact be merely a low end part. The graphics portion can still be utilized to do specific functions even when paired with a standalone GPU. Having a physics co-processor directly on the CPU can bring a far greater level of performance and immersiveness.
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