BSN interviewed John Taylor, Director of Client Product and Software Marketing at AMD, regarding the upcoming Fusion Developer Summit to be held June 13-16, 2011 at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington.
Both Microsoft and Arm will be giving keynotes at the event. ARM is going to reiterate their commitment to OpenCL with their own Mali series GPU, tying nicely to AMD’s Fusion APUs, i.e. Ontario (9W) and Zacate (18W) and upcoming Llano APUs (up to 95W).
Also noteworthy from the interview:
With Fusion architecture, CPU (ok, APU) is getting a driver update each and every month for the first time in history of the silicon. The company insists on a vision that by making a continuous Catalyst driver updates for the Ontario/Zacate/Llano APUs, the CPU and GPU parts will be constantly updated with application profiles and API updates. As a result, users of AMD APUs should experience smoother application performance as the time passes by.
Do note that with the Fusion strategy, AMD is no longer just following computing standards, but rather setting them in silicon with smart adjustments. A good example for that is the upcoming C-60 APU that gives you up to 33% higher performance in typical CPU tasks or a massive 43% performance boost in DirectX / OpenGL / OpenCL - all while staying in the same power envelope (9W).
OK - this was a surprise. Best Buy has published a video explaining APUs to the masses, and it is actually a pretty compelling and informative little video for consumers. Good work Best Buy!
Monday AMD announced it’s first Fusion APU-based systems. What exactly is an APU? For AMD’s this new line of processors means - in a single die design - multi-core CPU (x86) technology, a powerful DirectX®11-capable discrete-level graphics and parallel processing engine, a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block, and a high-speed bus that speeds data across the differing types of processor cores within the design.
The next generation of AMD integrated graphics and processors will be based on the Fusion Accelerator Processing Unit (APU). In late 2010 AMD will ship two low-end Fusion APUs code named Ontario and Zacate, followed in 2011 by a high-end APU code named Llano (32nm, 4 x86 cores, and multi-core GPU that is OpenGL, DirectX 11, and OpenCL compatible).
Jon Peddie Research talks about how these APUs will impact the CAD market (registration required to read the full article).
Take aways:
Eyefinity is a big value add - Fusion will directly drive 3 HD display.
Hardware-accelerated tessellation engine in the Fusion processor will offer even more capability to complex CAD drawings.
Shading, lighting, shadows and reflections take a lot of graphics power and here is where AMD will pull ahead of Intel Sandy Bridge due to its more powerful GPU.
Not everyone who uses a workstation is a power-user. There are a lot of entry-level and mid-range engineers, designers, financial analysts, and video editors who spend long hours in front of a workstation. Two of the main complaints those users have is noise and heat. Fusion will run cool, and quiet.
For more graphics power, an external FirePro GPU can be ganged to the GPU in the Fusion processor using CrossFire.
"This is a definite and real inflection point in the industry and the turning point for many companies and users in that it opens up new opportunities and capabilities."
AMD demonstrated the Llano APU at its Technical Forum in Taipei, Taiwan. It is a 32nm single die combining 4 Phenom II-type cores with powerful DX11 graphics.
The video of the Llano demo shows three compute-intensive workloads running simultaneously on Windows 7:
- multi-threaded calculation of the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places
- decoding 1080p HD video from a Blu-ray disc
- n-body DirectCompute particle effect using both GPU and CPU cores (Microsoft’s equivalent to OpenCL) , achieving around 30 GFLOPS (a relative measure of the available capacity to assist the CPU cores to accelerate a non-graphics application).
AMD aims to bring this level of raw compute power to mainstream PC users in 2011.
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