AMD makes Fusion CPU, GPU agnostic

6/15/2011 6:01 PM EDT

This is a very confused pitch, that self-contradicts.
If you are shipping silicon with CPU & GPU, then clearly you are not "CPU and GPU agnostic" - that's as silly as Ford selling a car, then trying to claim it is Engine and Transmission agnostic!
Then they try to spin that "unified memory address space" is something new, but that's always been a cost/performance trade off.
GPU memory went separate for speed reasons.
Then they choose an acronym that rhymes with FAIL, what are they thinking ?

6/15/2011 7:03 PM EDT

I'm struggling to interpret the specific meaning of this announcement. The statement about combining x86 and GPU being CPU and GPU agnostic does seem to be contradictory.

It sounds like perhaps this is a consumer computer architecture that would be resented as an alternative to the current PCI based system. I don't see how that could get any traction without participation of Intel. If it's a proposed architecture for mobile computing devices, then it would probably need the participation of ARM.

If it's a proposed standard architecture for embedded computing systems, then it starts to make sense.

6/16/2011 1:27 AM EDT

I think that what AMD is referring to here is that the ability to create software which can seamlessly leverage OpenCL / GPGPU requires a development ecosystem which itself can be largely hardware agnostic (or atleast offer reasonable abstractions).

This would allow ARM clients to more performance / efficiency, much as AMD hopes to. The AMD Fusion platform is intentionally FP anemic due to their expectation that FP heavy workloads will be offloaded to the GPU component.

Much as with the lag (in consumer computing) from multicore availability to software which takes advantage of it, we are faced with the same issue with Fusion - and AMD is looking for partners to speed up that transition.

6/16/2011 5:14 AM EDT

@JoeDev

I think you are on the money. Software developers are used to write once, compile as necessary, run on many platforms. The advent of multicore roadmaps risks breaking that easy of migration and the software industry react well to it.

So while Fusion has in the past been an AMD-x86 only thing Fusion System Architecture will, in the future, be a high-level specification for heterogeneous multicore hardware including CPUs and GPUs of any flavor. And AMD says it wants lots of hardware companies to play.

6/16/2011 5:20 AM EDT

the software industry WONT react well ....that should say

6/16/2011 5:28 AM EDT

To go back in time, we have to understand why CPUs and DSPs were separate. Cant CPU do what a DSP does (MAC-multiply:accumulate)? Obviously it can but it is NOT fine-tuned for DSP operations. DSP does it faster than a CPU. The same way DSP cant do what a CPU does because it was not fine-tuned for CPU operations. The case of CPU and GPU arose because of similar reasons. CPU can do what a GPU does, but performance will not be as good - especially if we take current day graphics and gaming consoles. Fusion approach remains to be seen - whether AMD/Intel is letting their CPU core do GPU work or GPU core do CPU work. Either way, performance goes downhill. Proof of the pudding is in the eating.

6/16/2011 6:29 PM EDT

In AMD's APP SDK, they expose an intermediate language that they call CAL. I've briefly looked at it, and it looks like a "portable assembly language". What I mean by "portable assembly language" is that there's a collection of simple, assembly-like, but non-machine-specific instructions for specifying different operations, such as a 4-wide floating-point vector add.

Their compiler for OpenCL/CAL, which appears to be based on LLVM, could be rapidly re-targeted for other architectures. Likewise, the scheduling/load-balancing runtime should be readily portable to other, non-x86/ATi GPUs.

6/17/2011 7:58 AM EDT

@DF

Thanks for the insight.