W1zzardthis is basically what intel tried with larrabee and failed

bucketfacethis could potentially lead to cuda becoming open, if AMD can get enough support from developers, they'll have to or risk seeing it fall to the way side in favor of somthing that supports both.

BenetanegiaAMD has followed a totally passive approach because that's the cheaper approach. I'm not saying that's a bad strategy for them, but they have not fought for the GPGPU side until very recently.

BenetanegiaEh? No. CUDA will dissapear sometime in the future most probably, when OpenCL caches on. OpenCL is 95% similar to CUDA anyway, if you have to believe CUDA/OpenCL developers and it's free so Nvidia doesn't gain anything from the use of CUDA. It will not go anywhere now and it's not going to be in 1 or 2 years probably, because Nvidia keeps updating CUDA every now and then and stays way ahead with more features (the advantage of not depending on stardardization by a consortium). At some point it should stagnate and OpenCL should be able to catch up, even if it's evolution depends on the Khronos group.

Name: David Kanter 6/15/11

Dan Fay on 6/14/11 wrote:
---------------------------
>Hi David,
>
>If you're not already planning to do so, I'd be really curious how well this architecture
>is expected to perform with GPGPU.
>
>
>Thanks!

At a high level, it appears that their next architecture will exceed Fermi in a number of areas. This is to be expected, and I'll be most interested to see how Kepler pushes programmability forward.

Some of the GPGPU improvements include:
1. Real caches
2. Graphs of data parallel kernels
3. Exceptions, recursion, function calls
4. Better branching, predication, masking, control flow
5. No more VLIW, instead a scalar+vector arch with fewer scheduling rules and more regular code generation
6. Acquire/release consistency model
7. ECC support for some SKUs
8. Substantially better DP performance for some SKUs
9. Faster global atomics

I don't really want to give away too much, since I will be working on an article soon.


David

St.Alia-Of-The-Knife"Full GPU support of C, C++ and other high-level languages"

i know that the GPU is way faster than the CPU,
so does this mean that GPU will replace the CPU in common tasks also??

BenetanegiaFermi already does most of those things, so it's quite the opposite. Many of the new features in AMD's design were implemented in G80 5 years ago or later in GT200. AMD is way behind on this and is almost funny to see that they are going to follow the same architectural principle as Nvidia is being using for the past 5 years. Of course they are going to make the jump instead of doing it gradually like Nvidia did, but that's only posible thanks to Nvidia doing the hard work and opening doors for years.

NC37Hopefully it won't turn into another DX10.1. ATI does it, but NV says no so the industry caves to NV.

Course this is much bigger. Saw this coming. Our CPUs are gonna be replaced by GPUs eventually. Those who laughed at AMD's purchase of ATI...heh. Nice move and I guess it makes more sense to ditch the ATI name if you are gonna eventually merge the tech even more. Oh well, I still won't ever call their discrete GPUs AMD.

BenetanegiaNvidia has been much more in contact with their GPGPU customers, asking what they needed and implementing it. And once it was inplemented and tested, by asking what's next and implementing that too. They have been getting the answers and now AMD only had to implement those. Nvidia has been investing a lot in universities to teach and promote GPGPU for a very long time too. Much sooner than anyone else thought about promoting the GPGPU route.

AMD has followed a totally passive approach because that's the cheaper approach. I'm not saying that's a bad strategy for them, but they have not fought for the GPGPU side until very recently.



In fact yes. Entrepreneur companies constantly invest in products whose viability is still in question and with little markets. They create the market.

There's nothing wrong in being one of the followers, just give credit where credit is due. And IMO AMD deserves none.



They have had top performers in gaming. Other than that Nvdia has been way ahead in professional markets.

And AMD did not pioneer GPGPU. It was a group in Standford who did it and yes they used X1900 cards, and yes AMD collaborated, but that's far from pioneering it and was not really GPGPU, it mostly used DX and OpenGL for doing math. By the time that was happening Nividia had already been working on GPGPU on their architecture for years as can be seen with the launch of G80 only few monts after the introduction of X1900.



That for sure is a good thing. My comments were just regarding how funny it is that after so many years of AMD promoting VLIW and telling everyone and dog that VLIW was the way to go and a much better approach. Even downplaying and mocking Fermi, well they are going to do the same thing Nvidia has been doing for years.

I already predicted this change in direction a few years ago anyway. When Fusion was frst promoted I knew they would eventually move into this direction and I also predcted that Fusion would represent a turning point in how aggressively would AMD promote GPGPU. And that's been the case. I have no love (neither hate) for AMD for this simple reason. I understand they are the underdog, and need some marketing on their side too, but they always sell themselves as the good company, but do nothing but downplay other's strategies until they are able to follow them and they do unltimately follow them. Just a few months ago (HD6000 introduction) VLIW was the only way to go, almost literally the godsend, while Fermi was mocked up as the wrong way to go. I knew it was all marketing BS, and now it's demostrated, but I guess people have short memories so it works for them. Oh well all these fancy new features are NOW the way to go. And it's true, except there's nothing new on them...

St.Alia-Of-The-Knife"Full GPU support of C, C++ and other high-level languages"

i know that the GPU is way faster than the CPU,
so does this mean that GPU will replace the CPU in common tasks also??

Hayder_MasterSo they point to big improve in performance and only benchmarks can prove it.

SapientwolfThe GPU is faster than the CPU at arithmetic operations that can occur in parallel (Like video and graphics). The CPU is much faster at sequential logic. The CPU has been tailored toward its area and the GPU to its own a well. However now we see the gray area between the two increasing more and more. So AMD is working hard to make platforms in which the CPU can offload highly parallel arithmetic loads to their GPUS, and make it easier for programmers to program their GPUs outside the realm of DirectX and OpenGL.

One will not replace the other, they will merge and instructions will be exectuted on the hardware best for the job.

Wile EYou know, AMD has always had these great gpu hardware features (the ability to crunch numbers, like in physics), then promises us great software to run on it (GPU accelerated Havok anyone?), but the software never materializes.

I'll get excited about this when it is actually being implemented by devs in products I can use.

Wile EYou know, AMD has always had these great gpu hardware features (the ability to crunch numbers, like in physics), then promises us great software to run on it (GPU accelerated Havok anyone?), but the software never materializes.

Benetanegiathat in order for these big chips to be viable, you need the consumer market in order to have some volume and refine the process, bin chips, etc. Even if it's an small market like the enthusiast GPU market, with less than 1 million cards sold, that's far more than the 10's of thousands HPC cards you can sell. At least for now. Maybe in some years, with more demand, it would make sense to create a different chip for HPC, but then again the industry is moving in the opposite direction, and I think it's the right direction.

xtremesvThe future is fusion, remember? CPU and GPU becoming one, it's going to happen, I believe it, but are we gonna really "own" it?

These days cloud computing is starting to make some noice and it makes sense, average guys/gals are not interested in FLOPS performance, they just want to listen to their music, check facebook and play some fun games. What I'm saying is that in the future we'll only need a big touch screen with a mediocre ARM processor to play Crysis V. The processing, you know GPGPU, the heat and stuff, will be somewhere in China, we'll be given just what we need, the final product through a huge broadband. If you've seen the movie Wall-E, think about living in that spaceship Axiom, it'd be something like that... creepy, eh?

W1zzardyup .. i dont think amd has successfully brought any software feature to market.. maybe x86_64 if you count intel adopting it



i agree, but why does amd waste their money with useless computation features that apparently have nowhere to go other than video encode and some hpc apps ?
if there was some killer application for gpu computing wouldn't nvidia/cuda have found it by now?

RejZoRAnd even that hyped video encoding is mostly done on CPU which makes it utterly useless as it's not much faster than pure CPU anyway. They were bragging about physics as well but they never made them. Not with Havok, not with Bullet, not with anything. I mean if you want to make something, endorse it, embrace it, give developers a reason to develop and build on that feature.
In stead they announce it, brag about it and then we can all forget about it as it'll never happen.
They should invest those resources into more productive things instead of wasting them on such useless stuff.

Only thing that they pulled off properly is MLAA which uses shaders to process screen and anti-alias it. It functions great in pretty much 99,9% of games, is what they promised and i hope they won't remove it like they did with most of their features (Temporal AA, TruForm, SmartShaders etc). Sure some technologies got redundant like TruForm, but others just died because AMD didn't bother to support them. SmartShaders were good example. HDRish was awesome, giving old games a fake HDR effect which looked pretty good. But it worked only in OpenGL and someone else had to make it. AMD never added anything useful for D3D which is what most of the games use. So what's the point!?!?! They should really get their stuff together and stop wasting time and resources on useless stuff and start making cool features that can last. Like again, MLAA.

Thatguythey should call D3D round about the bend, down the street, up the alley, over 2 blocks and in the ditch 3d. Becuase it sure as shit ain't direct. AMD will move away from directX, they see where the market is headed.

W1zzardthe market is headed toward console games that are directx (xbox360) and that get recompiled with a few clicks for pc to maximize developer $$