Will "Infinity Fabric" allow multiple GPUs to appear as one?

[JDG1980]

There has been quite a bit of talk recently about AMD's "Infinity Fabric". This is supposed to offer flexible interfaces with cache coherency. Any chance that this will finally allow the creation of a multi-GPU solution that appears to the system as one massive GPU? The existing Crossfire/SLI solutions like AFR are becoming less and less effective, and explicit multi-adapater on DX12/Vulkan places the responsibility on the developers, most of whom won't bother. In order for multi-GPU to become mainstream, it is going to have to be 100% transparent to the system.

Leaked slides indicate that there will be a Vega 10 x2 card in 2H 2017. It's hard to see this being worth it unless it offers something better than the usual, trouble-filled multi-GPU options we've seen so far.

 

[Phynaz]

Simply put, no. It doesn't help software become multi-GPU aware.

Hardware isn't the issue.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Simply put, no. It doesn't help software become multi-GPU aware.

Hardware isn't the issue.

i think its more like.

today: No not right now.

Navi: Looks like it otherwise small chips interconnected wont work. If everything connects to the L2 then its obvious how they scale out, then its just a question of how they handle the front end.

But thats not mgpu in the traditional sense

 

[alcoholbob]

The problem with multiple GPUs is that the CPU now becomes the bottleneck as it has to balance the load between the multiple cards. You often see 6 and 8 core CPUs start pulling ahead significantly over quad cores for example when you start running 2-4 cards.

It's just not something the CPU can do very well. You might need the development of some kind of hardware solution, like an ultra low-latency intermediary co-processor that can aggregate all the GPU cores into a unified cluster.