Clearspeed talks to AMD about coprocessor

[Deleted member 3]

Clearspeed is talking with AMD about the development of a coprocessor for AMDs CPU's. The processor will tick at 250MHz and consume only 10 Watts with all of its 96(!) cores. In theory this should result in 25 Gflops. Unfortunately this might be severely limited by whatever bus it will use, the picture shows a PCI-X bus. To counter this bottleneck it can use up to 4GB DDR2 as buffer. If only programmers would be able to produce programs that use 96 cores...

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[wazzledoozle]

Coprocessors are rather a step backwards wouldnt you say...

 

[W1zzard]

it all depends on the application. if you run your in-house written applications and need A LOT of processing power and you can easily rewrite existing code i think there are uses for that. but i definitely not see this going into mainstream

 

[overcast]

Coprocessors are rather a step backwards wouldnt you say...

No, think of physics processors. Offload that from CPU and Vidcard.

 

[KennyT772]

these items are just various ideas that a company thought would sell. hell if you asked someone if they wanted to use ram as a harddrive they would prolly call you a retard. yet the ram drive that recently came out was increadibly fast. who knows anymore. this is the sort of thing that will lead to single tower server farms. and things such as physics processing and number crunching in general are what these are best at so let the tech develop.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Coprocessors are rather a step backwards wouldnt you say...

Your videocard has a coprocessor, your soundcard has one too often, the Ageia physx card contains one, RAID/SCSI controllers contain one. Basically all processors besides the CPU are coprocessors. Usually for very specific tasks though.

 

[Mussels]

consider the options of it tho. currently, all data has to pass through the CPU, be it your mouse, keyboard input, HD crunching etc. they dont NEED a 4800+ for that so a 96! core 250MHz chip could off-load a HUGE amount of work away from the CPU and make your games so much prettier.


edit: latency would kill it. i got all excited for a bit there

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

I really think if a little bit of this could be integrated seamlessly into the CPU itself, it could provide a nice boost in cpu power.. especially once multi-threaded apps really start flying on these things..

 

[XooM]

could be great for extremely application-specific uses, such as hardware raytracing, advanced encryption, A/V encoding, etc. could be useful.

 

[TarTheDark]

I personally wouldn't mind 25 GFlops of extra performance Questions are, how efficiently can it be used and, of course, how much will it cost.