AMD position on GPUs in a CPU socket

[Edrick]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/...ccelerators_in_CPU_Sockets_Make_No_Sense.html

Interesting since they believe that Fusion is a perfect solution. So half CPU, half GPU is great, but a full GPU in a CPU socket is not. I do not follow their logic. I think they just might be trying to down play Knights Ferry.

 

[Cerb]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/...ccelerators_in_CPU_Sockets_Make_No_Sense.html

Interesting since they believe that Fusion is a perfect solution. So half CPU, half GPU is great, but a full GPU in a CPU socket is not. I do not follow their logic. I think they just might be trying to down play Knights Ferry.

AMD needs mass market chips. Knight's Ferry is not that. They are downplaying it, but they are also right. The masses will benefit more from faster GPUs, and beefier AVX extensions (not that I like Intel's handling of them, but c'est la vie). Even an Atom core is high-performance compared to what they have in Knight's Ferry.

AMD needs to be able to have one design, with a reliability-tweaked server variant, power-tweaked mobile variant, and give desktop CPUs the middle leftovers. Spreading that out over more than a low-power (Bobcat++) and a high-performance (BD++) chip will be too thin (it may be that even that is too thin).

NVidia has much more to be concerned with, when it comes to Knight's Ferry. Intel has hardware cache coherency and fast caches to counter Tesla's FLOPS.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Knights Ferry/Knights Corner is PCI Express though. The confusion came from pictures just showing the chip, rather than the card.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=32677123&postcount=6

 

[Edrick]

Knights Ferry/Knights Corner is PCI Express though. The confusion came from pictures just showing the chip, rather than the card.

That confusion seems to be widespread.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/di...May_Adopt_QPI_Bus_Instead_of_PCI_Express.html

There are benefits to using QPI over PCIe, but also drawbacks.

 

[IntelUser2000]

The way they were first showing it, I got confused too. For some time I was quite sure they were moving to CPU socket using QPI.

Knights Corner isn't in any way a GPU(the texture units in original Larrabee was taken out and they enhanced DP FP throughput) so maybe AMD is referring to someone else, perhaps Nvidia?

 

[Phynaz]

Lol, Torrenza "makes no sense". Took them this long to figure it out?