Mark Pillsbury (no_spam@gmail.com) on 12/15/11 wrote:
---------------------------
>David Kanter wrote:
>
>>>4. Bury the animosity toward Nvidia. It hurts
>>> the whole industry when there is no performance
>>> compatibility between Nvidia and ATI graphics.
>>
>> Hrmm, what do you mean? AMD's architecture is
>> more efficient in terms of perf/W and perf/area,
>> so I don't see any reason for them to give up
>> that advantage.
>
>My thinking is that programmers don't have time to write two versions of graphics
>software, one for AMD and one for Nvidia. I wish AMD would swallow their pride
>and support CUDA or Nvidia would provide better support for OpenCL. Even if the
>API is the same, the graphics microarchitectures have diverged too much. The end
>result is that most software doesn't use a fraction of the >capability of either company's chip.

There is no reason for anyone other than Nvidia to support CUDA. Nvidia does support OpenCL and DirectCompute, which are likely to be the two APIs that really matter.

>>>5. Price the Opteron 6000 series at the same
>>> price per socket as the Opteron 4000 series
>>> to encourage more adoption of high socket
>>> count systems and high core count software
>>> optimized for AMD's microarchitecture.
>>
>>Wouldn't it just be easier to have a bunch of field engineers optimize the applications?
>
>Field engineers can't redesign applications to use more >cores.

They can and do. AMD and Intel both have SW engineers who tune other people's software.

>I think both Intel
>and AMD are being penny wise and pound foolish by charging >an arm and a leg for
>the versions of their chips needed for three or more >socket systems. They should
>love it when someone wants to put a lot of processor >sockets in a system. It helps
>get software ready for the next generation chips with more >cores.

That's probably $1-2B/year worth of profit you are talking about giving away. Do you have any reason to believe that it will somehow create $2-4B in new revenue?

It simply does not make sense.

>About the longer term need for AMD to have a 3G/4G >wireless modem: I think they
>just need to find 20 to 30 good engineers and give them >two years.

There's no way that 20-30 engineers could create a 3G and 4G modem in two years.

>Wireless technology
>is not rocket science. LTE and GSM support might be >enough. Maybe they could license
>some of technology from some small design companies.

If that was possible, why do you think that Nvidia spent $300M acquiring Icera?

David