XBitlabs: Advanced Micro Devices Set to Unveil New Strategy Next Week

[SickBeast]

Perhaps Charlie Sheen helped AMD come up with their new strategy. WINning.

You know what, though, AMD's path is clear. They need to sell a whole ton of the stuff that they currently have created. They've got an excellent portfolio for laptops and tablets. Their R&D budget is going to have to wait. They're going to run out of cash.

 

[cbn]

There's also Marvell.

Thanks, I almost forgot about them. I remember them as being primarily used in RIM phones, but it looks like that is changing...

According to this wikipedia entry Qualcomm has replaced Marvell in the latest Blackberry phones.

The latest Blackberry devices such as the Bold 9900/9930, Torch 9810, 9860/9860 feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz. Entry-level models, such as the Curve 9360, feature a Marvell PXA940 clocked at 800 MHz

 

[cbn]

I thought performance/watt doesn't scale perfectly at higher power levels.

It will be interesting to see how far ARM will want to scale:

So far at 3Ghz and 2 watts TDP (40nm/28nm), ARMv8 is making some big claims for integer:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2205710

 

[hooflung]

Thanks, I almost forgot about them. I remember them as being primarily used in RIM phones, but it looks like that is changing...

According to this wikipedia entry Qualcomm has replaced Marvell in the latest Blackberry phones.

Marvel is in a lot of NAS raids as well as most of the pogoplug products. They may very well be on their way out as the defacto Plug SoC but they still have NAS on lock down.

 

[ocre]

Possible, but only if the A15 provides amazing real performance, and can be produced in massive quantities before MS needs the device out.

Well really think about it, you dont need an ultra high powered chip at all. Stuff like AI, physics will be great with lots of cores that dont need to be very powerful. Also the basic serial computing doesnt need a powerful CPU at all.

If next gen consoles would use ARM, they would use many arm cores for the low power they draw. This would give them more power for the GPU. The consoles were limited by their power draw. When the xbox 360 hit the shelves it was at the absolute MAX power they could realistically do. They may have been too aggressive and ambitious. M$ knows they have a limit, its finding the most powerful configuration for that envelope. All next gen consoles will be power constrained. They will be challenged to get the most out of that cap.

So ARM cores make a lot of since. They can use them, absolutely. I dont know why everyone thinks you need a powerful CPU. Lots of smaller cores will be amassing for the bulk of workloads. Physics, AI, etc would suit well like this. I can easily see it as being considered in these next gen consoles. Even with the performance of ARM chips today. Spread out the work threw many cores and it can be even more efficient by far.

 

[Cerb]

Well really think about it, you dont need an ultra high powered chip at all. Stuff like AI, physics will be great with lots of cores that dont need to be very powerful. Also the basic serial computing doesnt need a powerful CPU at all.

Ultra-powered, no. But something in line with a middle of the road Core 2 would be a good place to start. If the ARM can handle halfway-complicated data structures reasonably well (linked lists, b-trees, and octrees are awfully common), then it could be very good.

And, if the recent SPECint scores are indicative of performance elsewhere (CPUs have been designed around SPEC benchmarks before), it indeed may be that good.

 

[Arachnotronic]

If it's too good to be true, it probably is. Remember this before we all start declaring ARM the godly CPU architects.

 

[ShadowVVL]

If intel is going this way I would think they would be going with tri gate @22nm or lower ARM.
If so amd might fall behind in ARM,but it will be interesting to see what amd and intel bring to the table.

 

[ed29a]

If the ARM can handle halfway-complicated data structures reasonably well (linked lists, b-trees, and octrees are awfully common), then it could be very good.

Uh? What assembly instructions you mean? I programmed in mainframe and x86 assembly, none had any special instructions for complex data structures. As far as I know, they are a high level language concepts that are broken down into a bunch of memory moves and/or byte compares by the compiler. Pretty sure ARM does the same thing as x86 (albeit with a less flexible instruction set): move bytes, loop instructions, different conditions and do a bunch of arithmetic operations. In other words, if your compiler/OS supports complex data structures, be that ARM or x86, they will work fine.

 

[soccerballtux]

Well really think about it, you dont need an ultra high powered chip at all. Stuff like AI, physics will be great with lots of cores that dont need to be very powerful. Also the basic serial computing doesnt need a powerful CPU at all.

If next gen consoles would use ARM, they would use many arm cores for the low power they draw. This would give them more power for the GPU. The consoles were limited by their power draw. When the xbox 360 hit the shelves it was at the absolute MAX power they could realistically do. They may have been too aggressive and ambitious. M$ knows they have a limit, its finding the most powerful configuration for that envelope. All next gen consoles will be power constrained. They will be challenged to get the most out of that cap.

So ARM cores make a lot of since. They can use them, absolutely. I dont know why everyone thinks you need a powerful CPU. Lots of smaller cores will be amassing for the bulk of workloads. Physics, AI, etc would suit well like this. I can easily see it as being considered in these next gen consoles. Even with the performance of ARM chips today. Spread out the work threw many cores and it can be even more efficient by far.

I would welcome this change because it would mean our 4 and 8 core machines would actually be busy doing things instead of sitting around using only 2 cores (cough Starcraft2 cough).

 

[ElFenix]

If next gen consoles would use ARM, they would use many arm cores for the low power they draw. This would give them more power for the GPU. The consoles were limited by their power draw. When the xbox 360 hit the shelves it was at the absolute MAX power they could realistically do. They may have been too aggressive and ambitious. M$ knows they have a limit, its finding the most powerful configuration for that envelope. All next gen consoles will be power constrained. They will be challenged to get the most out of that cap.

what makes you think that ARM at the performance levels of the powerpc chip used in the 360 won't draw just as much power?

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Uh? What assembly instructions you mean? I programmed in mainframe and x86 assembly, none had any special instructions for complex data structures. As far as I know, they are a high level language concepts that are broken down into a bunch of memory moves and/or byte compares by the compiler. Pretty sure ARM does the same thing as x86 (albeit with a less flexible instruction set): move bytes, loop instructions, different conditions and do a bunch of arithmetic operations. In other words, if your compiler/OS supports complex data structures, be that ARM or x86, they will work fine.

While any Turing-complete computer can use them, some computers can work with complex data structures better than others. And it's generally not about the assembly instructions available, but about the memory subsystem. Small caches and high latency to RAM = you suffer badly on most real-world acceleration structures.

The funny part is that past-gen console chips were actually quite awful at running complex data structures. To the point that on Cell, you generally just use the raw horsepower available to avoid using them. As I said earlier -- any modern cellphone chip is better than the last-gen consoles on that kind of code.

 

[Arachnotronic]

what makes you think that ARM at the performance levels of the powerpc chip used in the 360 won't draw just as much power?

Because everyone's drinking the "ARM Kool-Aid". The media, the hype, everything -- people get funny notions like, "Oh, all ARM instructions are fixed width, so that makes it 10000x more power efficient than poopy old x86 because the decoding stage is such a huge part of the transistor/TDP budget!!".

Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer are both "x86" -- the ISA matters very little, it's the circuit/component design, process technology, and micro-architecture that makes a difference. And one of the above chips is very svelte, power efficient, speedy chip, and the other is a power hungry slow mess.

 

[Cerb]

Uh? What assembly instructions you mean?

None. I mean memory latency (RAM controllers and tuning is SoC-dependent), hardware prefetch existence/accuracy, branch predictor accuracy, taken/missed branch penalties, cache performance, and OOOE efficacy, mostly--where modern x86 CPUs excel, save for Atom and Bobcat. Nothing that is much tied to ISA, so long as the ISA is sufficiently fleshed out.

Good well-known benchmarks indicating such performance, with SPECint as a baseline for comparison, might be SPECweb, and TPC.

 

[ocre]

what makes you think that ARM at the performance levels of the powerpc chip used in the 360 won't draw just as much power?

Because i dont see any reason to make a single powerful Chip. Instead of one 3 core 3.2 ghz chip, we could easily have 3 dual arm chips at 1.1 ghz sipping just 1w of power at full load! they can run independently out of order from one another. Obviously the new consoles can even have more cores and Arm CPUs to bring even higher levels of AI, and physics to the table.

Because everyone's drinking the "ARM Kool-Aid". The media, the hype, everything -- people get funny notions like, "Oh, all ARM instructions are fixed width, so that makes it 10000x more power efficient than poopy old x86 because the decoding stage is such a huge part of the transistor/TDP budget!!".

Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer are both "x86" -- the ISA matters very little, it's the circuit/component design, process technology, and micro-architecture that makes a difference. And one of the above chips is very svelte, power efficient, speedy chip, and the other is a power hungry slow mess.

Yea, thats what i meant. I think so cause intel and x86 is so much better and i am drunk on ARM kool-aid.

BTW. x86 isnt in any console currently so whats up with that? Just thought to throw in another x86 is superior to ARM jab when its unrelated in every way?

 

[ElFenix]

Because i dont see any reason to make a single powerful Chip. Instead of one 3 core 3.2 ghz chip, we could easily have 3 dual arm chips at 1.1 ghz sipping just 1w of power at full load! they can run independently out of order from one another. Obviously the new consoles can even have more cores and Arm CPUs to bring even higher levels of AI, and physics to the table.

maybe you missed the important part. i've gone ahead and made it obvious:

what makes you think that ARM at the performance levels of the powerpc chip used in the 360 won't draw just as much power?

Yea, thats what i meant. I think so cause intel and x86 is so much better and i am drunk on ARM kool-aid.

BTW. x86 isnt in any console currently so whats up with that? Just thought to throw in another x86 is superior to ARM jab when its unrelated in every way?

because intel won't license the design to MS or sony. which keeps them from being able to shrink it on their schedule. which affects long term profitability greatly.

 

[ocre]

maybe you missed the important part. i've gone ahead and made it obvious:






because intel won't license the design to MS or sony. which keeps them from being able to shrink it on their schedule. which affects long term profitability greatly.

Wow!

If thats what you mean then, i have no clue why your even addressing me for that kind of question. With those big letters your making even less since. What the heck are you talking about? What makes me think? I never thought of the power draw of an arm chip at the performance levels of the power PC in the Xbox. Why would i? What makes you ask me this question? I dont see any reason to have an ARM chip that powerful at all. I think your turning a spin there. I dont give a freakn crap about an arm chip that powerful, its nothing to do with my point. Your acting a fool

For anybody who doubt that ARM could be used in the next gen consoles:

http://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-to-power-worlds-first-arm-based-hybrid-supercomputer-14195049/

Arm is very capable in running a supercomputer. They are building one. Why the heck would anyone think arm couldnt power a console?

Please let me know!

tegra 3 is not as powerful as the powerfPC in the Xbox360, but as you can clearly see, many tegra3's are very capable of running a supercomputer. Imagine that.

 

[BD231]

Our chips suck so we're going to move into a market that doesn't require much power at all.

Way to innovate AMD.

 

[ElFenix]

Wow!

If thats what you mean then, i have no clue why your even addressing me for that kind of question. With those big letters your making even less since. What the heck are you talking about? What makes me think? I never thought of the power draw of an arm chip at the performance levels of the power PC in the Xbox. Why would i? What makes you ask me this question? I dont see any reason to have an ARM chip that powerful at all. I think your turning a spin there. I dont give a freakn crap about an arm chip that powerful, its nothing to do with my point. Your acting a fool

why would you want to backslide on performance? how would that make 'since'?

For anybody who doubt that ARM could be used in the next gen consoles:

http://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-to-power-worlds-first-arm-based-hybrid-supercomputer-14195049/

Arm is very capable in running a supercomputer. They are building one. Why the heck would anyone think arm couldnt power a console?

Please let me know!

tegra 3 is not as powerful as the powerfPC in the Xbox360, but as you can clearly see, many tegra3's are very capable of running a supercomputer. Imagine that.

yeah, you need a million of them which is great if you have something that can benefit from massively parallel calculations. is that necessarily applicable to consoles? no.

 

[ocre]

why would you want to backslide on performance? how would that make 'since'?



yeah, you need a million of them which is great if you have something that can benefit from massively parallel calculations. is that necessarily applicable to consoles? no.

my bad, "sense"

Why would you have to step backwards? instead of a 3.4ghz 3 core chip why not use 4+ dual core ARM A15 cores running at 2.0ghz. The combines throughput should blow away the powerPC chip and use considerably less watts. And if it doesnt or thats not enough, you could always add more CPUs till you get the performance desired, all spread across many energy efficient ARM cores. Can you dig it? Its not so complex.


and to the rest of your post. Yes parallel calculations are completely applicable.. Other than a GPU and its functions, what other task does a cpu for the consoles need to do? does the inputs or sound need a powerful cpu? What else do you need from you CPU? Physics and AI are perfect for parallel cores. What is there in the consoles that needs a powerful CPU that wouldnt work with many low powered cores instead? i would like you to enlighten me.

 

[ElFenix]

so what you want is an ARM version of cell. a chip notoriously difficult to program for. and which currently destroys any ARM implementation. and which, when IBM got around to shrinking it, dominated the Green 500 supercomputer list.

the point here being there is nothing in the ARM ISA which makes notably better at performance/watt than powerpc, and when built to desktop power budgets isn't notably better than x86. powerpc is fully capable of operating on anemic power budgets and has a range of architectures available to do that. but, IBM has a lot more experience building high performance processors out of powerpc than ARM does out of ARM.

 

[ocre]

double?

see next post !

 

[ocre]

so what you want is an ARM version of cell. a chip notoriously difficult to program for. and which currently destroys any ARM implementation. and which, when IBM got around to shrinking it, dominated the Green 500 supercomputer list.

the point here being there is nothing in the ARM ISA which makes notably better at performance/watt than powerpc, and when built to desktop power budgets isn't notably better than x86. powerpc is fully capable of operating on anemic power budgets and has a range of architectures available to do that. but, IBM has a lot more experience building high performance processors out of powerpc than ARM does out of ARM.

I dont want this? wat are you talking about? All i said is it that its feasible that the next consoles could use AR chips in them. I didnt even recommend it, i just said its possible and could happen. It is not unrealistic like the mass of ppl here seem to think.

Another thing going ARM may very well be cheaper then PowerPC way. It might be, i wouldnt care if it was or wasnt. I also wouldnt care too hoots if they used ARM chips or freakn chips from Mars! Why would i?

My point is clear: Dont be so quick to rule out ARM chips in the next gen consoles.

Why would the cell being hard to program have anything to do with ARM. ARM currently has programers by the millions. More ARM cpus are sold now than any other type. It stands to reason programming wont be an issue. But i still dont care if they use ARM or not.

If you still cant see it as at least possible than your just being hard headed. It is possible, and that is all i wanted to bring up.

 

[Idontcare]

I dont want this? wat are you talking about? All i said is it that its feasible that the next consoles could use AR chips in them. I didnt even recommend it, i just said its possible and could happen. It is not unrealistic like the mass of ppl here seem to think.

Another thing going ARM may very well be cheaper then PowerPC way. It might be, i wouldnt care if it was or wasnt. I also wouldnt care too hoots if they used ARM chips or freakn chips from Mars! Why would i?

My point is clear: Dont be so quick to rule out ARM chips in the next gen consoles.

Why would the cell being hard to program have anything to do with ARM. ARM currently has programers by the millions. More ARM cpus are sold now than any other type. It stands to reason programming wont be an issue. But i still dont care if they use ARM or not.

If you still cant see it as at least possible than your just being hard headed. It is possible, and that is all i wanted to bring up.

I would laugh my balls off if ARM becomes the standard hardware platform for consoles, and then we see the entire gaming industry shifting to a model of designing for consoles (PC's are forgotten, like Macs) with "console ports" to the smartphone market then being the low-barrier-to-entry sales generating bonanza.

Gamboy, PSP, gone as convergence makes gaming on your iPhone the norm for form factors smaller than your TV. PC gaming becomes as quaint as sliderules and spindle drives.

 

[ElFenix]

Why would the cell being hard to program have anything to do with ARM. ARM currently has programers by the millions. More ARM cpus are sold now than any other type. It stands to reason programming wont be an issue. But i still dont care if they use ARM or not.

If you still cant see it as at least possible than your just being hard headed. It is possible, and that is all i wanted to bring up.

Cell is difficult to program for because to take advantage of it you have to take advantage of the parallelism which isn't an easy thing to do. your 8 ARM core CPU isn't going to be any easier to program for. programmers are having a hard enough time figuring out what to do with quad core CPUs.

possible, yes. likely, no.

and the power consumption isn't going to be any better than powerpc. <--- which has been my point this whole time.