AMD's next CPU will be radical departure
The slow march to Fusion
FOLKS ABOARD THE good ship AMD have promised that its next-generation CPU marchitecture will be, as the Pythons would have it, something completely different.
Giuseppe Amato, the grandly-titled Technical Direct of Sales and Marketing for EMEA, let slip in a recent interview that "If I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different."
He declined to elucidate further, but it seems that the statement re-iterates DAAMIT's committment to the changes previously mooted at the company's Technology Analyst Day way back in the summer of last year. As a prelude to its fully-fledged Fusion product, which aims to combine GPU and CPU products onto a single chip, AMD is moving to a modular core design which it has called M-Space. It's next-gen desktop chip, coded Bulldozer, makes use of this kind of design architecture to enable it to combine cores to work more efficiently on single-threaded tasks whilst being flexible enough to split off and work on multi-threaded tasks too. Bulldozer is a complete clean break from the K8 architecture, so will truly be something new.
Of course, given that most of this information is already out there on the wibble thanks to on-the-record presentations by AMD staff, it seems strange that Amato wasn't willing to discuss it. Perhaps he didn't get the memo? µ
Comments
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Going triple X will Be Balistic. Just from TOP, 2 billion Tranies. Take Barcelona L3 Cache Data CrossBar, Once its Completely Understood & migrate it to: BULLDOZER.Thats what I said. Also in GPU Dept, going from 5X Redundancy for stability, take about half of those Tranies & use them in More Linear Way. So 3X redundancy, Still Super Stable, Yet Probably Beat nvidia, Simpler ButterflyHigh design.
OK Thats All for Now.
Drashek
Profitable?
Maybe the next chip line will actually be profitable!I dub thee
Reverse HyperthreadingBlah, blah, blah...
Yeah, and the Phenom CPU architecture was suppose to be the greatest thing since the invention of CPUs...whatever.AMD CEOs resigning, mass layoffs, horrible stock profits...AMD is truly in trouble with no signs of recovery anytime soon.
AMD had better get their act together and really create a product that is worthy or they will join the countless number of bankrupt companies...
How's about they focus on turning a profit first?
There might not be a "next architecture" if AMD can't turn a healthy profit on the one that they are working on right now.Focus, AMD, focus.
Nice Move
CPU- -GPU on a single chump:pros:
1) no more add-in GPU cards
2) no more PCIe, SLI, X-Fire
3) simplicity
cons:
1) heat
2) upgrade options
3) performance
'If you [amd] can't beat them [intel] ... then do something different."
-cheers
T|K
Improvements? blah..
Yeah... Next step is to paint processors in shiny faboulus colors.... then they will introduce poli rings.... However their cpu's are not so bad at all, but still losing performance to Intel.Do or die
The future is multithreaded and integrated. Massively parallel architecture with over 100 cores and all components of a PC tightly integrated on a single chip is what awaits us beyond 2012-2015 which is, in astronomical term, practically tomorrow. The first to get there will prevail. The other, most probably ALL others, will perish. Natural selection in its most radical manifestation.When I say integration of all components, I mean the chipset (That would include Ethernet, USB, Firewire, SATA etc…) the audio and video, and all the other small chips you see on a motherboard. All integrated into a single chip.
The day you have 100 cores for processing general data coupled to multiple specialized sub-cores through an on-chip super high speed bus to handle everything in real time, with minimal overhead, then the current corporate symbiosis that exist between multiple vendors will be rendered redundant with no purpose to fulfill anymore. Useless = dead.
What limit do we still have in a PC today? Audio has certainly reached the limit of human range of perception with 192Khz 48bits 64 channels specs. 2D video is certainly not a problem anymore with 36bits rendering and over 12M pixels resolution, again beyond our visual range of perception. When I give you both included on the CPU, what is the need then to buy a creative lab sound card (or even to put a codec chip on the motherboard) or a dedicated 2D video card?
3D is still a problem and will need upgrade path until you can’t tell the difference between virtual and reality. A couple more generations and we will be there, removing the need for any dedicated video apparatus. The same will soon be true for all and every aspect of a PC. Real time audio/video recognition/translation, potent artificial intelligence and eventually, the creation of a sentient being (the ultimate technological nirvana) will be based, to some extent, on the level of parallelism and integration we can achieve.
The next decade will be… fascinating.
Ramon Zarat
AMD's *next* CPU...
Assuming they're still around? :(Rock or Niagara/Larrabee?
I'm curious to see what they come up with. The easy way out would obviously build a Niagara/Larrabee esque chip out of a bunch of Geodes. Or what would be amazing is if they truly did something amazing like rock with it's hardware scout, letting them have both single threaded and throughput performance.White elephant is a lead balloon.
That will be like chipset graphics and will be saleable in cheap soho systems. Useless waste of CPU space to gamers for whom a dedicated GPU will always be needed to provide sufficient computing power which will be efficient because you dont need to change the whole CPU for a graphics upgrade. A better PCIe bus is all this requires in the longer term.But AMD are not targeting gamers anymore, they are going for mid range. If they are cheap enough fusionesque CPUs will be worth using, but will they be able to turn a profit? That depends on the competition and Intels answer would be no.
Currently AMD seem to be losing volume and performance and you cant help thinking that the two are somehow related.