AMD Cayman Architecture article online

Hot on the heels of our OpenCL article from last week, we're following up with an in-depth look and analysis of AMD's new Cayman microarchitecture:

The major trend in graphics is programmability and targeting highly parallel, general-purpose workloads. Historically, AMD has focused on gaming performance. However, DirectCompute and OpenCL are beginning to take hold and create the seeds of a software ecosystem. AMD's new Cayman architecture is a gradual and evolutionary step towards more general purpose hardware and a cautious embrace of GPU computing. While primarily a graphics processor, Cayman has made some fundamental microarchitecture changes to improve programmability and performance. In this article, we explore the Cayman architecture including the new VLIW4 SIMD, dynamic power management and other enhancements. Our report concludes with a preliminary assessment of the Radeon 6970 and 9650 graphics cards and projections for frequency, power and performance of future compute products.

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT121410213827

As always, we hope you will enjoy the article and share your comments and feedback.


Regards,


David