gamerk316 :
This is incorrect misinformation at best, blatant lying at worst.. We've been successfully making massively parallel systems work since the 70's, they were known as mainframes. Earlier in this discussion I described exactly how you would build a data processing stack that would host thousands of simultaneous connections and process tens of thousands of transactions all running on hardware that is massively parallel. When it comes to data processing massively parallel is the only way to go. This also works in the home though home based data processing tends to be miniscule in comparison. Data encoding / rendering are massively parallel tasks, sorting cataloging and indexing are all massively parallel tasks. Playing video games are massively parallel tasks, though the massively parallel part tends to be done by specialized coprocessors rather then by general purpose processors.
I don't care what color of paint you put on your face in the morning but don't go around lying about the nature of computing. We've been in the age of parallelism for a long time now.
I explicitly called some tasks, such as rendering and encoding, massively parallel. You can simply add more cores on specialized co-processors (GPUs) to infinity to improve performance of those tasks. And yes, anything to do with processing data can be made massively parallel. I'm not arguing that point. I'm arguing Juans argument that every task under the sun can be handled this way. It can't, and for those tasks, you are limited by how long it takes your serial processing to complete.
GamerK, you do realize Bulldozer was designed to be a server chip first and foremost. Meaning it was designed to run in situations where apache creates a thread and runs in on a CPU core for every request.
You have it backwards. You are thinking AMD designed 8 core CPU because they thought multi-threaded software was coming.
They basically designed a server chip, found it didn't meet most demands of current software for desktop consumers, and then tried to push developers into using more cores for things.
But as for those of you who think that the PC is dying, well.
The "PC is dying" numbers don't include DIY sales. In fact, the whole "PC is dying" thing is only referring to people who buy pre-built systems from Dell, Wal-Mart, etc.
So, imagine in your head how many people used to buy desktops before smartphones, tablets, and laptops were the main computing devices. Now imagine that the DIY market is growing enough to substantialy offset a bunch of shmucks who can't built their own computers. These internet blogs and finance sites love to grab the number of PC shipments from Dell, Gateway, etc and then go "ZOMG DESKTOP SKY IS FALLING ITS ALL OVER BUY 5 iPADS SO YOU CAN MULTITASK!!!!!" without even thinking about how accessible and easy it has become to build your own computer or how that market is basically exploding much faster than console sales are.
I could see AMD releasing an HEDT platform if they can get some form of HSA working across dGPU and dCPU. It doesn't have to be as good as HSA on an APU, but it needs to at least be better than just straight up OpenCL. Which, I think is possible. It makes more sense to release a gimped HSA and more powerful traditional computing platform.
The big thing some of you are forgetting is that HSA depends on software success. The majority of people who are into HEDT are early adopters of technology and are usually rather vocal about their purchases. They are ideal candidates for HSA. It would also provoke more companies to write more HSA software.
From a software developer's standpoint, AMD sort of needs an HSA HEDT platform. HSA exists to increase performance and an AMD APU will never be as fast as two big dCPUs and dGPUs. So the high end people will never move to APU only. Yet at the same time APU is the only thing that can do HSA and HSA is used to push performance. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but convincing people to drop traditional performance for the sake of "maybe someday you can get HSA for the software you need to use!" isn't going to work on anyone.
AMD needs HSA HEDT platform to spur software development of HSA software. Imagine if we saw HEDT platform where games ran Mantle, could access memory of each GPU and main system memory without having to copy everything to VRAM like we do for AFR, and you have another GPU doing physics and another doing global illumination calculations. It's like PhysX before Nvidia destroyed it and turned it into "lets give the part of a computer which is usually a bottleneck in games more computation to do so we can sell more chips!" (remember old PPUs?), but on steroids.
To put AMD HEDT platform into perspective for you all.
How many would switch from an Intel i7, i5 or AMD FX 3m/6c or better to AMD APU with HSA if it meant a few of your programs where HSA accelerated but you lost performance in traditional programs?
And how many of you would switch from an Intel i7, i5 or AMD FX 3m/6c or better to a platform that was HSA capable (but was less efficient at HSA than a full fledged APU) but had 5m/10c or better Steamroller or Excavator CPU with at least one Tahiti or Hawaii class GPU?
The answer is obvious to me. The second one sounds better. Perhaps HSA would be a lot slower than if you put Hawaii class GPU on the same die as 5m/10c FX class CPU, but if it ends up 40% faster than just plain old OpenCL (or CUDA for that matter) while APU is 200% faster, does it even matter? It's still faster than regular OpenCL and CUDA. Which, IMO, is a win. It is not the best that HSA can do but it should still be significantly better than no HSA at all.
But that is why I think HEDT AMD platform still makes sense. HSA depends on getting a lot of HSA capable systems up and running. And ignoring the HEDT platform, which is full of knowledgeable people who basically go on forums to advertise for free (like we're all doing now), is a massive mistake and a massive missed opportunity for AMD if they just stick to APUs forever.
whats this ?
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram