Article: AMD's Mobile Strategy
By: mpx (mpx.delete@this.nomail.pl), December 18, 2011 7:21 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
anon (anon@anon.com) on 12/17/11 wrote:
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>I'm talking about the general-purpose compute core for high performance server/client workloads, of course.
>
>Even if you drop the client part of it, server is still far from EP, so SMT approach
>is superior to lots of small cores, IMO.
SMT is orthogonal to lots of small cores. You can have lots of small cores with SMT (Sparc T3) or low number of large cores without it (Phenom, Core i5 2500).
What you are talking about is CPU composed of duplicated hyperuniversal cores vs. hybrid approach + acceleators.
Accelerators are done deal. All large companies use them or plan to use them. Oracle for cryptography, Apple has OpenCL in every Mac, AMD promotes APUs, IBM is expected to include them in Power7+, while already having them in Wire-Speed processor. Intel is not very enthusiastic, but still does transcoding accelerator an provides OpenCL for Macs. Microsoft has always provided ways to acceleratr graphics operations (2D, 3D, video), now it promotes DX11 compute.
Differentiated cores did not yet appear, but I find it likely that with larger transistor budgets and power budgets going down this is a valid direction.
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>I'm talking about the general-purpose compute core for high performance server/client workloads, of course.
>
>Even if you drop the client part of it, server is still far from EP, so SMT approach
>is superior to lots of small cores, IMO.
SMT is orthogonal to lots of small cores. You can have lots of small cores with SMT (Sparc T3) or low number of large cores without it (Phenom, Core i5 2500).
What you are talking about is CPU composed of duplicated hyperuniversal cores vs. hybrid approach + acceleators.
Accelerators are done deal. All large companies use them or plan to use them. Oracle for cryptography, Apple has OpenCL in every Mac, AMD promotes APUs, IBM is expected to include them in Power7+, while already having them in Wire-Speed processor. Intel is not very enthusiastic, but still does transcoding accelerator an provides OpenCL for Macs. Microsoft has always provided ways to acceleratr graphics operations (2D, 3D, video), now it promotes DX11 compute.
Differentiated cores did not yet appear, but I find it likely that with larger transistor budgets and power budgets going down this is a valid direction.