Friday, November 1st 2013
AMD to Unveil Next-Generation APUs on November 11
As a follow-up to our older article on how December-January will play out for AMD's next-generation APU lineup, we have news that the company will unveil, or at least tease its next-generation desktop APU, codename "Kaveri," on November 11, 2013. It's when the company will host its APU'13 event, modeled along the lines of GPU'13, held in Hawaii this September, where it unveiled its Radeon R9 200 and R7 200 GPU families. On its backdrop, the company will also hold its 2013 AMD Developer Summit, which brings together developers making software that take advantage of both CPU and OpenCL-accelerated GPUs. APU'13 will be held in San Jose, USA, and like GPU'13, will be live-streamed to the web. In addition to new APUs, the company is expected to make some big announcements with its HSA (heterogeneous system architecture) initiative that brought some big names in the industry on board.The agenda for APU'13 follows.
- 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. (PST), Monday, November 11:
o Lisa Su, senior vice president & general manager, Global Business Units, AMD: "Developers: The Heart of AMD Innovation"
o Phil Rogers, corporate fellow, AMD: "The Programmers Guide to Reaching for the Cloud" - 8:30 - 9:30 a.m. (PST), Tuesday, November 12:
o Mike Muller, CTO, ARM: "Is There Anything New in Heterogeneous Computing?"
o Nandini Ramani, vice president, Java Platform, Oracle Solutions: "The Role of Java in Heterogeneous Computing, and How You Can Help" - 1:15 - 2:15 p.m. (PST) Tuesday, November 12:
o Dr. Chien-Ping Lu, senior director, Mediatek USA: "How Many Cores Will We Need?"
o Tony King-Smith, executive vice president, Marketing, Imagination Technologies: "Silicon? Check. HSA? Check. All done? Wrong!" - 8:30 - 9:30 a.m. (PST), Wednesday, November 13:
o Dominic Mallinson, senior vice president, Software, Sony: "Inside PlayStation 4: Building the Best Place to Play"
o Brendan Iribe, CEO, Oculus VR: "Virtual Reality - A New Frontier in Computing" - 1:15 - 2:15 p.m. (PST) Wednesday, November 13:
o Johan Andersson, technical director, DICE: "Rendering Battlefield 4 with Mantle"
o Mark Papermaster, CTO, AMD: "Powering the Next Generation Surround Computing Experience"
44 Comments on AMD to Unveil Next-Generation APUs on November 11
cheers for the input though Dwade however , this being TPU , most readers here fecked efficiency right out the window on day 1 of their new build or old rebuild when they turned Eist / cool and quite off and all other eco features off then overclocked the snot out of it and left it like that eternally or until instability shows up only to step it back a bit:confused:
MOOOOOAAAARR POWERSSSS not less pls:D
Were all the tropical island resorts taken this time, AMD?
Anyways, back on topic. 832 GCN cores seems like a waste of space/power if they're just going to be held back by the memory bandwidth anyways. I'm thinking it'll be between 384 and 512 cores.
There are many conceivable answers, a wider bus among them (256-bit ddr3 would be sufficient for a ~512sp design), although perhaps less probable as we move to ddr4 and it's 1dimm-per-channel restriction and larger, more demanding iGPUs that will quickly outpace a 128-bit ddr4 bus. Certainly there is bga, but I wonder if amd is really willing to take that leap with their larger designs (as a consumer platform, ie not the ps4 or iterations of bobcat).
Hypertransport, if not a discrete (or optional) gddr5 bus to a gpu cache (ala what used to be called Sideport Memory in the discrete IGP days) seemed like a realistic option even up to this generation. While 32-bit, with the max bandwidth of a link resting somewhere near what gddr5 is capable on AMD's current gpu controllers, and meshing fairly nicely with being around half of what a 32/28nm iGPU would need (and twice what a 128-bit ddr3 bus could deliver), that would have more-or-less made sense. Obviously moving past this gen it would be less so, unless itself coupled with a ddr4 bus (ie ddr4 + gddrX).
From there, we have the possibilities of larger/faster caches (like the X1's on-die ram) offsetting what is needed externally. There is also the possibility of things like on-package off-die caches (not unlike Intel's Iris) as well stacked dram like Volta.
Whatever their solution, they need to do it yesterday. Their strength is (and has always been) in the floating point computation per mm (per process/cost) their designs deliver. While HSA capitalizes on this fact, as it should, with each passing node they lose that (realistic) advantage to intel, whom can ramp clocks higher until they reach parity in design (and then clock them lower to save power) even as their priority lies in improving their cpu cores. With each passing gpu gen nvidia grows closer to parity, as they are clearly receding from purely thinking of their designs as efficient gpus to rather more-or-less a floating point core (that makes sense as such unit with or without the shell of a cpu). The scary thing about all that is...intel and nvidia, those least dependant on memory bandwidth currently, have shown their plans for going forward. AMD, whom already is restricted on all fronts by this reality, has not (outside the ps4.)
I find that sincerely troubling. No doubt they have an answer...I just hope it comes sooner rather than later.
As far as DDR4, the doubled bandwidth will stave off the bandwidth limitation for a while but even without the need for more bandwidth the 1 DIMM/channel limitation will encourage wider memory buses. The people who want lots of memory for the desktop or mobile will now need lots double the memory channels to achieve the same capacity with DDR4 as DDR3. The server market already moved in this direction with DDR3; the reason for the migration to 256-bit buses were more for the sheer memory capacity of that many memory channels rather than the increased bandwidth.
Let me put it simple... HSA > pure iGPU for games and crap.
HSA is ment as a revolution in x86... and possibly the only thing that can save it from a slow and painful death by ARM.
Seriously, while the iGPU part should be beastly, even if with the new IMC and faster DDR3 support, it'll still come short of it's potential... the great iGPU is far from the (only) point of Kaveri...
And I'm sure, on paper at least, adding an extra 192-256 ALUs make much more performance sense to AMD, than adding 2 extra cores.
arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amds-heterogeneous-uniform-memory-access-coming-this-year-in-kaveri/
Instead of having software decide where to run the process from, the hardware decides in real time which is more efficient, and then runs it. Addresses are the same, so no latency penalty for transporting it around. Hugely improved performance in DSP and other filtered data, serial data still run on the CPU cores.
So as I suspected, Ax-7x00x. Like A10-7800K for the next top tier model.
Edit: As well as the existance of next Athlon CPUs... Like Athlon II X4 770K or 850K? I guess.
When programming for the XBOX One, programmers have to write their code so that the most latency and bandwidth sensitive parts are sent to the small SRAM while the rest of the data is written to the larger but slower main memory. AMD doesn't want to have developers worrying about swapping data between the SRAM versus main memory, so they want a unified memory architecture like the PS4.
This is why I don't see something like alwayssts said occurring, where there is a small, high speed, on chip cache managed by software. The whole point of AMD's heterogeneous computing initiative is to make it as easy as possible for programmers to utilize heterogeneous computing. If there is to be a large SRAM cache at all, AMD wants something more like Crystalwell where the cache is managed by hardware and it is transparent to the developer.
Im thinking quad module for Amd but per layer and effectively 4x ddr4 imc per layer x2 for 16 logic cores from 8 tied across an 8 channel ddr4 interface to 8 gig of Tsv connected dram, drop the sytem ram too at this point and the year is,,, ,likely 2015:cool: