By: David Kanter (dkanter.delete@this.realworldtech.com), August 9, 2011 11:14 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Kevin G (kevin@cubitdesigns.com) on 8/9/11 wrote:
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>David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 8/9/11 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>
>>Enjoy, and as always, feedback and comments are encouraged!
>
>From the conclusion:
>
>"The system integration in Sandy Bridge is quite advanced and is a roadmap for
>the rest of the industry, namely AMD. In particular, it is clear that sharing the
>last level cache and unified power management are hugely beneficial to performance and power efficiency. "
>
>These two concerns for AMD's designs have already been discussed and up on AMD's
>road maps. Their next AMD GPU, Trinity, will feature a VLIW4 core which will still
>inhere the same communication model but improve upon the >power management features.
Right.
>Their SoC design due in 2013 is set to feature their next >generation of graphics
>architecture which will fully utilize x86 memory >addressing. Essentially the GPU
>at that point will be seen as another x86 node in terms of >coherency traffic.
That's not clear at all. I do not believe that AMD will ever use the same strong consistency model as x86 for their GPUs. They might make their GPUs potentially coherent, but that's very different from using x86 consistency.
David
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>David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 8/9/11 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>
>>Enjoy, and as always, feedback and comments are encouraged!
>
>From the conclusion:
>
>"The system integration in Sandy Bridge is quite advanced and is a roadmap for
>the rest of the industry, namely AMD. In particular, it is clear that sharing the
>last level cache and unified power management are hugely beneficial to performance and power efficiency. "
>
>These two concerns for AMD's designs have already been discussed and up on AMD's
>road maps. Their next AMD GPU, Trinity, will feature a VLIW4 core which will still
>inhere the same communication model but improve upon the >power management features.
Right.
>Their SoC design due in 2013 is set to feature their next >generation of graphics
>architecture which will fully utilize x86 memory >addressing. Essentially the GPU
>at that point will be seen as another x86 node in terms of >coherency traffic.
That's not clear at all. I do not believe that AMD will ever use the same strong consistency model as x86 for their GPUs. They might make their GPUs potentially coherent, but that's very different from using x86 consistency.
David