AMD just wrapped up their first Fusion Developer summit (AFDS) where they got indepth into the fusion architecture, talking about GPU computing and its future in modern architectures, and leaked some information about their upcoming design “Graphics Core Next”. Anandtech has all the details.
The fundamental issue moving forward is that VLIW designs are great for graphics; they are not so great for computing. However AMD has for all intents and purposes bet the company on GPU computing – their Fusion initiative isn’t just about putting a decent GPU right on die with a CPU, but then utilizing the radically different design attributes of a GPU to do the computational work that the CPU struggles at. So a GPU design that is great at graphics and poor at computing work simply isn’t sustainable for AMD’s future.
With AMD Graphics Core Next, VLIW is going away in favor of a non-VLIW SIMD design. In principal the two are similar – run lots of things in parallel – but there’s a world of difference in execution. Whereas VLIW is all about extracting instruction level parallelism (ILP), a non-VLIW SIMD is primarily about thread level parallelism (TLP).
via AnandTech.com – AMD’s Graphics Core Next Preview: AMD’s New GPU, Architected For Compute.
