Open-Source AMD HSA Should Come To Fruition This Year

[xeekei]

Nope:

http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-and-x86-cores-are-coming

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7991/amd-is-also-working-on-a-new-64bit-x86-core

That too.

Doesn't the on-die GPU take up quite a bit of die space, though? Why not put say two extra CPU cores, or bigger cores on the die instead. Enthusiasts don't need the on-die GPU, do they?

[grndzro]

A little questions, has AMD abandoned the high end CPU market? No future high end, high performace CPU for the enthusiast market? Or the future for AMD is an high end - high performance APU paired with a high end GPU for the enthusiast - gamer market? Will be an APU with HSA direct rival for Intel core i7 for example?

AMD's new SMT architecture is in the works for a 2015 release. It is said to be performance oriented.
Considering this is the first processor to be completely designed around RCM it should be very good. Especially when AMD has Jim Keller at the wheels.

[mmstick]

Doesn't the on-die GPU take up quite a bit of die space, though? Why not put say two extra CPU cores, or bigger cores on the die instead. Enthusiasts don't need the on-die GPU, do they?

I'm guessing it's easier and cheaper to pack GPU shaders than extra cores, as in a CPU packed full of cores is more expensive than a CPU+GPU sharing the same die space. Theoretically they could probably release a 16 core FX right now though.

[xeekei]

I'm guessing it's easier and cheaper to pack GPU shaders than extra cores, as in a CPU packed full of cores is more expensive than a CPU+GPU sharing the same die space. Theoretically they could probably release a 16 core FX right now though.

I also realised they want stuff like floating point to be done on the GPU, which is only a realistic goal if all CPUs have on-die GPUs.

[rikkinho]

amd need

amd need to improve the single core performance a lot and not put more and more cores in their cpu, why is the point of a 16 core cpu if apps use no more than 6/8?

[Nille]

Theoretically they could probably release a 16 core FX right now though.

Look at the Opterons, there are some 16 Core CPUs. They have 2 DIEs on the same Package.

[Luke_Wolf]

amd need to improve the single core performance a lot and not put more and more cores in their cpu, why is the point of a 16 core cpu if apps use no more than 6/8?

And just what real world application do you need more single thread performance for as opposed to more cores?
Games? Nope, Core 2s are fine in terms of single thread performance for most games
Compiling? There's a lot more to be gained by going parallel
Spreadsheets? Nope
Video Encode/Decode? That's offloaded to the GPU

[Nille]

And just what real world application do you need more single thread performance for as opposed to more cores?

Every Application profits from a higher single thread performance.

Games? Nope, Core 2s are fine in terms of single thread performance for most games

benchmarks call you a liar.

Compiling? There's a lot more to be gained by going parallel

Like the first but compiling is for most users irrelevant like weather calculations.

Spreadsheets? Nope

Speadsheets on the gpu are useless. Look at the calculations. You can create a scenario thats runs very nice on the gpu but thats not the case for everything or the most.

Video Encode/Decode? That's offloaded to the GPU

Decoding (Only for Playback, copy the frames to the system memory kills many benefits) yes but encoding not. The Hardware encoder doesn't provide the quality like a software encoder on the cpu. You can maybe use the ALU of gpu for some parts of the encoding (x264 can do this for some lookahead with opencl) but thats only interesting for HSA.

[Khudsa]

Thanks for the responses!

Nope:

http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-and-x86-cores-are-coming

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7991/amd-is-also-working-on-a-new-64bit-x86-core

That too.

Thanks Bridgman! Interesting readings.

[Luke_Wolf]

Every Application profits from a higher single thread performance.

Not even close, most applications are just sitting there spinning their wheels, or single shots that finish so fast that the actual performance of a CPU core hasn't mattered for quite some time. It's generally a very small number of professional workloads that are demanding of todays CPUs as well as RTSes where a lot of units have to be calculated at once. Want to guess what's true of most of those? They're problems better solved by going parallel as opposed to serial.

benchmarks call you a liar.

Oh really? Please do point to a game other than skyrim that under real world conditions a Haswell i7 has an advantage over the FX-8350 that can actually be perceived. Also I would like to point out that under minimum requirements Battlefield 4 and other demanding games say : Core 2 duo, and for their recommended or max requirements they all say a "modern quad core".

Like the first but compiling is for most users irrelevant like weather calculations.

Compiling is one of a very very few workloads that cares about CPU performance in a modern workload and please I would like to see these benchmarks where haswell at -j1 is beating a core 2 quad at -j4, the fact is it really doesn't take particularly long for a CPU to go through a file, what takes a long time is going through all of the files in a project, Calligra for example is 22,250 files which as a result means more cores is more important so that it can do more at once.

Speadsheets on the gpu are useless. Look at the calculations. You can create a scenario thats runs very nice on the gpu but thats not the case for everything or the most.

ah yes spreadsheets on the GPU are useless which is why AMD wasted all that money making LibreOffice have an OpenCL backend, obviously spreadsheets that actually have any significant CPU demands aren't massively parallel situations with a bunch of relatively simple operations. Further if you're not one of those situations where spreadsheets are being abused guess what? it doesn't actually have a real performance need and is just spinning it's wheels pretty much the whole time.

Decoding (Only for Playback, copy the frames to the system memory kills many benefits) yes but encoding not. The Hardware encoder doesn't provide the quality like a software encoder on the cpu. You can maybe use the ALU of gpu for some parts of the encoding (x264 can do this for some lookahead with opencl) but thats only interesting for HSA.

for most people's needs the hardware encoder is more than good enough, and if you're a professional you're going to have a render farm that you've hooked maya up to.