At AMD's Taipei Forum and Exhibition this week Atomic not only got all the details on AMD's new graphics card, we also got a great look at the upcoming Fusion Accelerated Processing Units.
It is quite telling that AMD is launching its new graphics cards with the target firmly on the mainstream. In the past the formula demanded that the high end wizzbangery was unveiled first for bragging rights, and then came a steady stream of lower end cards. Heck, we just saw NVIDIA do exactly that, launching a hot, power hungry high end card in the form of the GeForce GTX 480 just so it could claim ZOMGhuge numbers and show its architecture could compete with AMD's.
If NVIDIA had reversed the cycle and launched the highly impressive 1GB GeForce GTX 460 first it would probably have sold a heck of a lot more cards and AMD wouldn't be claiming such massive DirectX 11 market share numbers. In this scenario when the GTX 480 came out it would have had a bit more engineering time to get it into better condition for the benchmark record-winning time in the sun. But that isn't how the industry works. Making a new graphics card takes years of planning and engineering, and agility isn't really at the forefront of manufacturer's minds.
We had the chance to check out AMD's Taipei Forum and Exhibition (TFE) this Tuesday, where a surprising number of AMD executives gave us some great in-depth information about the new 'Barts' graphics cards, the 6850 and 6870. We also had a couple of teasers about the high end 'Northern Islands' codenamed cards, the RADEON 6950, 6970 and 6990 that are due in a month or so. While the forum satisfied the inner geek quite nicely it was also a fascinating look at just how confident AMD appears in what is set to be the biggest year in the company's history, and at how this mainstream first, enthusiast later approach is becoming the way forward for AMD.
ATI's consistent performance in the graphics card business may have saved AMD from the onslaught of Intel's Core processors but the real fruit of 2006's acquisition is the Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units. After years of talk about the concept, actual APUs are now so close that we've sen samples of both the proposed Atom-smashing Brazos family of 40nm APUs. We were allowed to photograph the tiny 9W Ontario APU (below), which is destined for netbook and ultraportable devices. We also saw a sample of the 18W Zacate APU, which will be the first foray of the APU into mainstream laptops and low end desktops.
Fusion isn't just something that will happen in the coming months. AMD currently has a roadmap of product out to 2014 and is throwing a lot of money behind OpenCL and DirectCompute programming. AMD's Vice President for Fusion Experience, Manju Hegde (also known as the co-founder of AGEIA and former CUDA marketer at NVIDIA) explained that this will involve everything from Webinars and a textbook on OpenCL processing to Engineers and a special fund to help software companies take advantage of Fusion.
He even spins the successful push of NVIDIA's CUDA language into universities as a good thing, AMD has a staunch corporate belief that if it plugs away on open standards then eventually they will win out. And considering its success in past battles like the decade ago DDR vs RDRAM one, or the siege-like defeat of the BTX form factor AMD has earned that confidence.
The other key to Fusion's success will be developing schedulers that smartly offload code to either the CPU or GPU parts of the APU. Once this happens programming will become a lot easier and AMD will truly realise its goal of heterogeneous computing (one of my new favourite buzzwords).
OpenCL is already appearing in things other than games. The next generation of browsers will support GPU acceleration features, and transcoding is becoming ever more important for both the networked home and the myriad of wireless devices, like smartphones and tablets, that need differing video formats.
The really interesting enthusiast stuff with Fusion (beyond having a netbook-like device with a modicum of gaming power) will come down the track. As much as we pried AMD is still holding back on so many details that it is impossible to get a solid picture of enthusiast plans, but whenever we suggested the possibility that an APU would use Crossfire to work with a GPU we were met with some pretty expressively knowing smiles. As far as rumours go this writer is prepared to back Crossfired APU and GPU, maybe with a little more conviction than my sneaking suspicion that we may see AMD and Apple get a lot closer if Fusion lives up to its promises.
While I was off picking away at details in Taipei, David locked Justin in a small dark room and fed him on a mix of Red Bull and some sort of seaweed-based nutrient slime for a week. All he had for company was a couple of new Barts core AMD RADEON cards (farewell Array Technologies Incorporated, your three letter acronym will be missed). The result is pretty spectacular; he even got the card running faster and cooler than when it arrived. It can all be found right here.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012