AMD: The Fusion APU Era Has Begun

[Guest]

@killerclick

It's in AMDs interest to keep the performance profile of bulldozer secret, if intel knew exactly how much they needed to beat AMD by they can easily tailor a product to kill AMDs offering, intel doesn't exactly release the best product they got at the lowest price they can offer, they're more of a lets see how much we can milk out of our customers kinda company

but it's more then obvious your very anti-AMD, even if you claim to have been buying AMD for the last decade or so, every single one of your recent comments with regards to AMD, as far as i can remember, has been with the single purpose of trashing them, your shorting AMD stocks or something?

But i might agree with you in regards to the CPU cores in the bulldozer may not be that spectacular, but then thats where their plans of utilizing the GPU stream cores to augment the CPU gets real interesting, that's a significant amount of untapped power there

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]RUShortingAMDStocks[/nom]It's in AMDs interest to keep the performance profile of bulldozer secret[/citation]

Nonsense, it's in AMDs interest to stop people from upgrading to Sandy Bridge.



[citation][nom]RUShortingAMDStocks[/nom]if intel knew exactly how much they needed to beat AMD by they can easily tailor a product to kill AMDs offering[/citation]

Huh? They're afraid of supplying samples, benchmarks and a firm release date because Intel might develop a new processor to kill them in four months? Intel has an established roadmap and all the decisions regarding the current product cycle have been made a long time ago. AMD has nothing to lose by providing more information about their upcoming products, the reason they're not doing that is they have nothing to brag about.



[citation][nom]RUShortingAMDStocks[/nom]intel doesn't exactly release the best product they got at the lowest price they can offer, they're more of a lets see how much we can milk out of our customers kinda company[/citation]

Any sane company is like that, including AMD. The reason AMD is offering their products at lower prices is because they have to.



[citation][nom]RUShortingAMDStocks[/nom]but it's more then obvious your very anti-AMD[/citation]

Yes I am because they're screwing up. I want strong AMD and Intel at each others throat because that means better products at lower prices. I feel the same way about NVIDIA, I don't want any of them to go down because I don't want to pay monopolistic prices.


[citation][nom]RUShortingAMDStocks[/nom]but then thats where their plans of utilizing the GPU stream cores to augment the CPU gets real interesting, that's a significant amount of untapped power there[/citation]

It's just dead silicon without software support. Where will I be able to use the GPU stream cores? Which applications? What are the release dates? I had a CUDA capable GPU since 2007 and it didn't make much difference in computer performance. The software developers are barely catching up with the number of cores available, how long will it take them to make use of the "APU" that will have a single digit market share?

 

[kronos_cornelius]

For the Fusion's category, I think I would rather go with the ARM Tegra 2. But for the high end, I will wait for Bulldozer.

 

[Guest]

@KillerClick

actually keeping the specs to your product under wraps is a very good way to prevent the competitor catching up, especially if you believe your product can outperform the competitor, if intel knew that bulldozer will be twice as fast as current model Phenom they can easily postpone sandy bridge or retool sandy bridge to target those performance, in fact if they knew bulldozers ability they can easily just release a product to beat bulldozer by just enough and shelve the higher performance abilities for another release, do you really think that we seen the true potential of sandy bridge, intel no doubt have kept a little extra performance headroom just in case bulldozer lives up to it's hype, reality dictates that some secrecy is required to keep competition healthy

as for the APU, there is still way too much speculation to know for sure how AMD plans on implementing this and thats why i said interesting, i didn't say it was a sure fire dunk, but if AMD can pull off the APU trick with minimal software retooling then that would be entertaining to say the least, not being a hardware engineer i do not know how hard would it be to implement a hardware level offloading of mathematical task. In reality AMD does not need to win over the entire industry they only need Microsoft to create a library function, once thats done people will start to use it, especially if it gives your software a speed advantage, Microsoft after all coded a whole independent 64bit version of XP just for the Athlon 64, the beauty of such a system is you dont need to figure out multi-threading and such likes, you just dump a large batch of calculations into the library and tell it to do it's thing, look at SSE, SSE2 and 3DNOW (especially 3DNOW)

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]StillShortingAMD[/nom]actually keeping the specs to your product under wraps is a very good way to prevent the competitor catching up[/citation]

AMD is the one catching up. They're so far behind Intel it's not competition anymore.


[citation][nom]StillShortingAMD[/nom]if intel knew that bulldozer will be twice as fast as current model Phenom they can easily postpone sandy bridge or retool sandy bridge to target those performance[/citation]

Postopne? Retool? Are you serious? Sandy Bridge is already on the market, the specs were frozen a long time ago, release dates set, it's done, not like they can pop an extra couple of cores in there or suddenly get better yields. There is no reason for AMD to keep quiet unless they don't have anything good to show. If they did, they'd want as many people as possible to know about it to keep them from upgrading to Intel.


[citation][nom]StillShortingAMD[/nom]In reality AMD does not need to win over the entire industry they only need Microsoft to create a library function, once thats done people will start to use it[/citation]

If it were that simple, GPGPU would've taken off years ago. CUDA was released in 2006, you also have Microsoft's DirectCompute and Open CL. None of them is exactly taking the world by storm. Also products using such technologies take years to develop (GPUs and CPUs are fundamentally different in many ways including they way you write programs for them) so even if Fusion/APU is a success it'll come way too late.

AMD has staked its future in something that may take a decade to realize (if it doesn't fail outright) and in the meantime Intel's entire lineup is beating them on price/performance and efficiency.

 

[Guest]

@killerclick

CUDA's failure is more to do with Nvidia's insistence on owning the technology rather then allowing for mass market adoption of an open standard, CUDA is a single vendor solution, similarly with DirectCompute which fragmented the market and stalled openCL, but good bets is if AMD throws their weight behind DirectCompute your going start to see some traction, the reason why GPGPU has not taken off is because intel has no vested interest in it, in fact they have very little IP in the area, it would also be disastrous for their CPU line

The beauty of a library function is you do not need to drastically rewrite your codes, you can plug all that into a wrapper and have the library handle it, look at directX, it's a wrapper for networking, input, sounds and graphics

so how many people do you think will upgrade between now and bulldozer's release? if they really needed to upgrade that much then i dont think AMD can stop them, are you going out to buy a sandybrdige CPU? it takes a while after a CPU is release before it goes mainstream (i.e. available in HP units in best buy). Heavens forbid should a vendor ever set a date for a product and miss that date...... you make it sound like just cause intel said it's good for that date that they do not have the digression to change that date

im not saying bulldozer is going be the bees knees or even a sandy bridge killer, but im not going to bury a company before seeing what they got to offer, but hey your probably right bulldozer is a weaker product cause AMD wont show you some benchies and you know sandybrdige is such a spectacular product that it's going take a miracle for anything to beat it

 

[eddieroolz]

I dearly hope so. I'm getting seriously annoyed at the 2-hour battery life of my older laptop.