AMD's Well Running Dry?

[corkyg]

AMD

 

[HannibalX]

I doubt usatoday understands the industry or is able to accurately report events in the industry.

The entire article is speculation. The same could be said for Intel around 2003/4. They didn't die did they? Remember when AMD's stock split way back when - Intel had record losses, and everyone was predicting their death. It didn't happen though.

 

[Wolfsraider]

Firing squad

*AMD Fusion: ''ready or not, here I come''

When AMD completed its acquisition of ATI, they announced a CGPU program called 'Fusion', which would integrate the CPU and the GPU at the silicon level. How can this help supercomputing? The on die GPU can be utilized as a FLOP stream processor which would mean a significant boost in FLOPS per chip, and the CPU and GPU will be connected by a crossbar, which would mean a large increase in CPU to GPU bandwidth and a huge decrease in power consumption when compared to a CPU and GPU on separate chips. Surely AMD will be making a lot of money out of this, however, Intel isn?t going to stand still and watch AMD gobble up market share, they are currently developing their own CPU-GPU product but they have been too tightlipped about it, as for NVIDIA, there are rumours that they too are developing their own CGPU.

*Folding@Home: a perfect example of the capabilities of GPUs

Stanford University has done extensive research on using GPGPUs for FAH, and has observed a 40x-50x performance increase in using GPUs over CPUs for their protein folding research.


*AMD's and NVIDIA's progress in the GPGPU space

Months ago, AMD released a product which they called 'stream processor' for stream computing which uses an X1900 chip, with the ROPs and TMUs disabled. Unfortunately it didn't gain much popularity, but AMD won't be giving up and are planning a ' stream processor 2' product based on their new R600 GPU, hopefully, this will be a killer GPGPU product.

Both AMD and NVIDIA have released GPGPU SDKs, AMD's Close to Metal API gives developers low level access to their GPU hardware by utilizing a thin hardware-software interface, thus providing over 10X increase in performance over using normal 3D APIs for writing GPGPU applications.

NVIDIA have recently released their CUDA SDK, which allows developers to write applications for their G80 GPU using the C programming language, CUDA is only supported by G80 but developers have NVIDIA's word that applications written using CUDA will work on all future GPU products made by NVIDIA.

Final words

The GPGPU concept is gaining a lot of reputation in the computer industry, but IMO, it isn't still clear whether it would be accepted as an industry standard, but rest assured that AMD, NVIDIA and in the near future Intel, will be doing their best to make it a success.

 

[Ultralight]

I have to agree with Pale Rider. Speculation abounds and so much of what is speculated doesn't come true -- like 90% of what we worry about doesn't come true. I remember when AMD first arrived on the scene seemingly forever stuck in the Super Giant Intel's shadow. Then came AMD's Athlon family...

There are cycles in business.

 

[DaveSimmons]

CGPU could be a killer product for laptops.

Instead of $500 laptops having Intel GMA or nv 6100, they'd have (say) x1600 level performance. Not great, but better than 90+% of the laptops sold now for under $1,000.