Alexko (a@b.com) on 4/4/12 wrote:
---------------------------
>This makes sense for previous (VLIW) AMD architectures, but do you still observe
>the same kind of thing on GCN? Assuming you've tried it, of course.

Yes...

Now that AMD dropped VLIW can you forgot all the bullshit said about it?

It is not Itanium, it is not a CPU used for serial codes, it is not latency sensitive, it is not... The list of differences goes on.

The compiler sucks, the memory pipeline have some issues and there are a few more issues across the board.

AMD did a really good work on keeping the same compute density without VLIW but this won't magically made all other problems disappear (the copmpiler problem were reduced since a VLIW design requires some optimizations they weren't doing), now, that the scapegoat is gone maybe they will be more serious about the compute performance...

But this doesn't explain why the hardware wasn't used for GPGPU, when selling a completly new idea wich poses a risk to the constumers being incredible fast on a few things is much better than being avarage on everything since for the former there will be cases where the benefits are bigger than the risks.

The public relations team play a big role on this and nVidia did well there.