AMD APUs to Become Efficient Faster Than Moore's Law

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burkhartmj

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Aug 31, 2012
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This article leaves me confused on 2 points.

A] last time I checked, Moore's law was about transistor count doubling every 2 years. While related to power efficiency, it's by no means a linear correlation from my understanding.

B] Moore's Law is an observational law. Sure, it's held true up to this point, but it's not some scientific wall like the speed of light or something, it can be outpaced.
 

everygamer

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They might not have a plan, sometimes people and companies set goals just to motivate. Think about it this way, set the bar at x25, they just did x10 over the last 10 year's, if they hit x15 in the next 10 year's it's still an improvement.
 

bemused_fred

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"There has to be something that gives AMD the confidence to make an announcement as ambitious as this… We're curious what it is that AMD has up its sleeve."

Oooh! Oooh! Is it....more cores?
 

ferooxidan

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"Creating differentiated low-power products is a key element of our business strategy, ...."

more like low performance product. sigh.....Come Broadwell and destroy AMD, so ATI can be ATI again and no more AMD. If things continue like this, even budget consumer will pick Intel when building budget pc, even their APU is not popular on notebook market. May be consider to make mobile cpu and stick with that, APU so so performance but great graphic performance is perfect for tablet, not for PC.
 

utengineer

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Dear AMD,

Call me when you embed a 295x2 on-die with the CPU. IN-TEL then, we are still trying to make Bulldozer run uphill.

Sincerely,

Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation
 

ZolaIII

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Dire Intel,
a die size of i7 quad core Haswell with graphics = 2154 cortex M4 cores (base implementation with DSP 65K gates).
Dire AMD you can achieve much more by tomorrow's lunch time if you drop x86 architecture.
 

InvalidError

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An M4 core alone is not going to do you much good without the IGP, IO controllers and other support circuitry. It also won't give you much general-purpose compute performance without cache memory, superscalar and out-of-order execution. Add all those missing bits back in and the gap shrinks drastically.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are around 110sqmm while Intel's Haswell core is 177sqmm. The performance gap between the two is far wider than the die size gap.
 

bluestar2k11

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"Come Broadwell and destroy AMD, so ATI can be ATI again and no more AMD."

If i'm not much mistaken, ATi is AMD, so to make AMD fail would be to make Ati fail, and both would cease to be. In the case AMD pulled out of the CPU market they would still be AMD making ATi cards, and all notebooks would be stuck with crappy intel graphics.

Lastly, if i'm not much mistaken, intel and amd cross license instruction sets, specifically the x86 to AMD, and the x64 to intel. If AMD closed, it's likely your intel chip might mean next to nothing when they're forced to discontinue x64 instruction sets in their next line of CPU's until they create their own (If they can do so without infringing on AMD's design), as it isn't likely AMD would sell them.
 

InvalidError

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If AMD disappeared overnight with nobody taking over their assets, there would be no one administering the licenses and nobody to stop Intel from continuing to use the x86-64 extensions.

Even if someone did pick up AMD assets, the instruction set cross-licenses are most likely perpetual and non-transferable so whoever purchased AMD would likely be unable to revoke Intel's perpetual license.
 

rush21hit

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If anything, I just hope that some serious flood of applications that actually supports HSA would be that much more common by then, if not all of them...Or all that improvements will be for nothing.
 

DRosencraft

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burkhartmj, you are correct. Moore's Law is about transistors, which forms a parallel track between the specific technology and the desired outcome, but is not a linear cause and effect relationship. And again on your second point, you are right, Moore's Law is not really a "law" as much as it is an observation of a phenomenon that is determined by the faith put into the law itself. It's not like gravity, that is persistent law concerning one of nature's forces. It's more like observing a pattern of behavior. There is no known means of breaking the laws of gravity, but Moore's Law can easily be thwarted by simple effort - either as AMD is trying to do here by way of pushing as hard as they can, or alternatively a lack of actual effort to make this same progress.
 

jasonelmore

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Moore's law is not just about transistors. Its a philosophical idea that every two years chips will become either twice as powerful, OR twice as cheap to make.
 

InvalidError

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Moore's original comment applied to transistor count but got extended to other areas that happened to fit at that time.

But no matter which Moore variant you look at for desktop CPUs though, things have been almost completely stagnant for the past three years. GPUs have been almost stagnant for quite a while too.
 

Achoo22

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The announcement is a trashy way to herald the fact that they're abandoning the x86 market because they just simply aren't good enough to compete.
 

InvalidError

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They are not abandoning x86. All they did was announce that they will be focusing heavily on efficiency and you can do that with x86 too. All you need to do is ditch enhancements that use a disproportionate amount of power for the performance gains they yield and put in new enhancements that yield better performance per watt. Clocks and IPC may suffer from this but total performance per watt still improves. You can look at Intel's Xeon Phi for an applied example of sacrificing single-thread performance optimizations in favor of massive parallelism using more energy-efficient cores.

The only thing I am really reading from AMD here is that they have decided to officially give up on pursuing single-threaded performance at any cost.
 

Urzu1000

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25 times more efficient? Sounds like they're trying to become Intel! Jokes aside, I seriously hope they do. If AMD started spitting out processors with the same quality as Intel, I would be happy to switch to the more cost-efficient rival. Currently though, the AMD CPUs (I'm a desktop user) just drink too much power to justify the cost over time.
 

Kevin Harrelson

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I bet that a big part of the strategy is trying to convince people to write code for the GPU portion. If that does not happen, they are hosed.
 

southernshark

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While I am dubious of AMD's ability to pull this off....

There is nothing scientific about Moore's "law'

to suggest that were AMD to do this it would be surpassing "science" is absurd.

Moore was a founder of Intel who simply predicted that transistors would double every 18 months and provided this guide to companies who bought Intel chips so that they could plan upgrades accordingly. There is nothing scientific about it.
 
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