AMD VP gives ballpark Llano gpu performance [Fudzilla]

[StrangerGuy]

Well the new 6000 series cards do really well at tessellation compared to the 5000 series. Also the leaked benchmark of the 6970 shows it getting 36fps versus the 480 at 30fps on the heaven tessellation benchmark.

So I think AMD "fanbois" will be bragging up tessellation for both integrated and dedicated GPUs.

Tessellation for Llano is like how the SB IGP has no DX11 support. Nobody really cares.

 

[Martimus]

I am more interested in who winns naming scheme . EU or APU

How do you "win" a naming scheme? And since you don't actually work for either company, why do you care whose marketing is better received? Does it make it easier for you to sell systems if one company has better marketing than the other, or does it not matter as long as one of the companies has marketing that is good enough (and you can sell the heck out of that product)?

 

[Martimus]

Also, this "article" from Fudo is just part and parcel of why I won't ever navigate that site anymore. It was as vague and uninformative as any written piece I have ever read. It doesn't tell anything of any substance, and was a completely pointless read.

I used to read that site, but I realized quickly that the man spent more time trying to say how right he was than actually giving any useful information. I found nearly no useful information, and nearly everything was just very vague and practically useless to me. I still wonder why anyone actually reads anything on that site?

That said, does anyone know what the VP actually said about performance? All I see here is that he said it should have better graphics performance than Sandybridge, but that was pretty much assumed anyway. Did he give any specific performance figures?

 

[jvroig]

The german kid above. does much research I find it hard to believe he didn,t understand . In fact its says much about the boy.

You mean Matthias? He's a CPU guy, far as I remember (but could be wrong). Give him a break, Nem.

 

[Vesku]

Marketing can do a lot when you have a big budget and a mostly uninformed audience "netburst", GHz battle, and "True quad" come to mind. Everyone is silent on positive comments regarding whether AMD will back up their APU with software. I watched the Llano demo Nemesis linked and the VP even mentions they want "ISVs" to push the capabilities, uh oh. I think JFAMD might want to take note.

 

[GaiaHunter]

I am more interested in who winns naming scheme . EU or APU

Hmm

EU

Vs


APU

Is it a contest?

 

[Scali]

Yep but you to errored . You wrote DX10 it should be 10.1

No, should be DX10 obviously, as I refer to the original GeForce 8800 (G80).

 

[GaiaHunter]

Made me laugh silently. WHO coined the GPU . What did ATI call theirs.

GPU/VPU are similar but Graphics sounds better than Visual when referring to a graphics card.

EU/APU. I think APU sounds better "Accelerated Processing Unit" or "Execution Unit" and APU much similar to CPU.

But I can see Intel resisting APU as it sounds like A(MD)PU.

Going to be fun.

 

[Scali]

EU stands for Execution Unit, which is Intel's name for what AMD calls stream processors and nVidia calls Cuda cores.
APU describes a complete processor.
They are not equivalent.

 

[Hard Ball]

Interesting post . I would very much like to see links to the microarchitects say this and what companies they work for . Intels tech seem to disagree. Link and not from AMD or it didn't happen

These including research done in through projects in industry (most of which I cannot share with people here) and academia; as well as symposiums and presentations held by industry sources (again, I cannot usually share); as well as my private conversations with my colleagues.

If you want a fuller discussion, I would be happy to have that, but it's not something that can be done through some brief citations of internet news articles. If you are truly interested, rather than just stoking fire in the thread, here are some seminal or otherwise important papers you can refer to; which you probably need to understand first before we can get to a productive discussion:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=325096.325124
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=318824&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=110764622&CFTOKEN=19547174
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1629488
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=141508
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=115953.115982
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=79809.79812

Edit:
And we can have a fully discussion in this thread in the coming weeks; whenever I have more time to devote to it. Or perhaps I will start another thread dedicated to the issue next weekend when I have a lot more time, if you are really interested.

 

[ilkhan]

EU stands for Execution Unit, which is Intel's name for what AMD calls stream processors and nVidia calls Cuda cores.
APU describes a complete processor.
They are not equivalent.

This. That bugged me too.

 

[Idontcare]

Thats as I percieved it.

eye2eye bud

EU stands for Execution Unit, which is Intel's name for what AMD calls stream processors and nVidia calls Cuda cores.
APU describes a complete processor.
They are not equivalent.

GPU/VPU are similar but Graphics sounds better than Visual when referring to a graphics card.

EU/APU. I think APU sounds better "Accelerated Processing Unit" or "Execution Unit" and APU much similar to CPU.

But I can see Intel resisting APU as it sounds like A(MD)PU.

Going to be fun.

My understanding was that APU was an ISA-level situation (instruction set expansion/enhancement) whereas Fusion was an architecture-level situation intended to enhance the performance of an APU-enabled ISA as well as furthuring the traditional role of IGPs.

Does Intel's EU actually expand the ISA? Does it expand beyond the role of the traditional IGP?

The german kid above. does much research I find it hard to believe he didn,t understand . In fact its says much about the boy.

Nemesis, this manner of condescending tone it really not warranted. There is no shame in not knowing everything, people need cut the guy some slack and do what they can to courteously assist him in his learning curve on this material. He didn't come here to be referred to as a "boy". He is a man who wants to learn about stuff outside is realm of immediate expertise. Kudos to that.

Also, this "article" from Fudo is just part and parcel of why I won't ever navigate that site anymore. It was as vague and uninformative as any written piece I have ever read. It doesn't tell anything of any substance, and was a completely pointless read.

I used to read that site, but I realized quickly that the man spent more time trying to say how right he was than actually giving any useful information. I found nearly no useful information, and nearly everything was just very vague and practically useless to me. I still wonder why anyone actually reads anything on that site?

That said, does anyone know what the VP actually said about performance? All I see here is that he said it should have better graphics performance than Sandybridge, but that was pretty much assumed anyway. Did he give any specific performance figures?

I may be wrong but I believe the VP specifically said the part would have 500Gflops. Everything else you've heard is from people extrapolating what that means to gaming.

 

[busydude]

The AMD guy says 400gflops to 500gflops .That a sizeable spread . I can say 400gflop and be as correct as someone saying 500gflops

Yup.

I guess he was talking about the whole product range, rather than a single processor to tell us an exact number.

 

[Idontcare]

This far out from actual release means they don't have final stepping and as such they don't have clockspeeds and power-consumption locked in just yet. The spread is reasonable for a +/-20% guestimate of final clockspeeds based on initial results. I don't see anything there as suspect.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Don't bring people or groups or politics here, or you will be having a vacation.

Talk about the issues and thats it or go to OT.

Just to be fair to everyone else, Yes, the world war crimes commisions did punish Nazi criminals(people), but lets leave that in the past. Its a matter of record.

Its not meant for these forums to discuss.

Markfw900
Anandtech Moderator[/B]

 

[Idontcare]

Nemesis it was people who did that, not a business, not a corporation, not a logo, that committed those crimes against humanity. Same goes for the Nazis. The Nazis did not commit crimes, it was people who were members of the Nazi party that committed crimes.

I hold nothing against IBM, nor its current employees, just as I hold nothing against Germany, nor its citizens. The people who committed the crimes...regardless their nationality, party affiliation, and employer...are/were the criminals.

I don't know if you can let it go, this crusade against IBM, but you should think it over. I highly doubt IBM has even a single employee today that was employed by the company in the 1945. The company has the same name only, not the same people and not the same corporate culture. Your feelings towards IBM are valid but misplaced, direct them towards the people who commited crimes, not an inanimate corporate namesake.

 

[Markfw]

OK guys, lets get back on the topic, no more off-topic, or I lock this,

Thanks Nemesis for the retraction. Anandtech is not the place to solve the problems of the world, just a place to discuss hardware.

 

[piesquared]

Good moderating.

Here's another interesting article looking ahead to 2011 for AMD. They seem quite confident about they're upcoming products so maybe it won't be the SB landslide prediction after all..

When I highlighted that the upcoming mainstream Sandy Bridge CPUs still might have quite a bit faster clock for clock cores compared to current Phenom core performance, AMD told me it will welcome a Sandy Bridge versus Llano face-off in a couple of months, when both are out, and that both the individual component benchmarks as well as overall experience tests should be looked at. You can see the proudly shown Llano wafers here:

And this

As for the low-end, AMD has elevated its 18W Zacate dual core from competing with Intel's Atom chip to fighting even Intel's mobile Core i3 and i5 parts in some cases. AMD is confident the combined CPU-GPU performance will stand the test, especially for thin and light high performance notebooks with multitouch tablet and full 3D functionality. Talking about tablets, the 9W Ontario Fusion part could be the heart of a really lovely Ipad competitor, bringing that same multitouch and real time 3D capability to a 10-inch 1440x900 or higher resolution one pound SSD tablet, for instance.

 

[Scali]

Does Intel's EU actually expand the ISA? Does it expand beyond the role of the traditional IGP?

They called them EU's even back in 2006, long before their IGPs were integrated in the CPU, or capable of any kind of GPGPU.
Their 945G chipsets had 8 EU's.

 

[jvroig]

12 EUs in current Intel HD Graphics (Clarkdale / Arrandale)

 

[wlee15]

Well that holds with what what Imagination Tech says scale to 12 cores

The Clarkdale/Arrandale GPU are not related to the PowerVR GPUs by Imagination Tech. The GMA 500 and 600 are the ones that are licensed from Imagination.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Waiting on that link

 

[Dresdenboy]

Well, I didn't come here to stir up the thread. And Nemesis, please don't be offended by my more than 10 years old nickname My nick is kind of an ID. People even know my real name as you saw above.

So far I just wanted to add a different POV. But in the end, SB will be capable of doing OpenCL computing regardless if it used the CPU cores, the IGP EUs or both groups of computing resources to accomplish that.

If you read my latest blog post's comments, you'll see, that some people are even worried about BD caused by what I posted (e.g. the instruction latencies). And sometimes I have to correct people you'd call "fanbois" to get the real message. For example someone is currently bashing SB on AMDZone because he didn't understand how Intel involves the 128b integer SIMD datapath for doing 256b FP SIMD execution. This goes over lengthy posts and consumes a lot of time. But I'm happy that others are replying to him as well.

 

[Aetherius]

About Llano:
1. 500 gigaflops can mean Radeon ~5570 or Mobility 5770 (GTX 460M?)
2. Llano is intended for low - mid desktop or Mid - High End Laptop
3. Memory controller maybe about DDR3 and GDDR5? (Well, intel build IGP and AMD build, GPU? They do have different research and development, I guess. So... different perspective?)
It is not like I hate intel product, it just I'm very disappointed with current intel HD graphic that it can't deliver good quality graphic. 2x or 5x performance than current Intel HD Graphic? Good, but I'm not sure about the quality though. Please understand that quality is NOT frame per second.
IMO the downside of Llano is the claim about 90% of 2010 performance, SB will be waaaay much better in this (will be more than 2010 performance).
Nothing to say for now, who care who's product is win? In the end, the buyer will win. For now, let's just wait for the final product.

 

[cbn]

It is not like I hate intel product, it just I'm very disappointed with current intel HD graphic that it can't deliver good quality graphic. 2x or 5x performance than current Intel HD Graphic? Good, but I'm not sure about the quality though. Please understand that quality is NOT frame per second.

Is that a driver issue or a hardware issue, because according to Fudzilla here it looks like Intel is planning to double graphics yet again in 2011/2012 with Ivy Bridge.

If that happens, Intel will have successively doubled its GMA HD graphics performance in every year from 2010 to 2012. (45mm GPU in 2010, 32nm GPU in 2011 and 22nm GPU in 2012).