AMD's Graphics Core Next Preview: AMD's New GPU, Architected For Compute
by Ryan Smith on December 21, 2011 9:38 PM ESTWe’ve just returned from sunny Bellevue, Washington, where AMD held their first Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS). As with other technical conferences of this nature such as NVIDIA’s GTC and Intel’s IDF, AFDS is a chance for AMD to reach out to developers to prepare them for future products and to receive feedback in turn. While AMD can make powerful hardware it’s ultimately the software that runs on it that drives sales, so it’s important for them to reach out to developers to ensure that such software is being made.
AFDS 2011 served as a focal point for several different things going on at AMD. At its broadest, it was a launch event for Llano, AMD’s first mainstream Fusion APU that launched at the start of the week. AMD has invested the future of the company into APUs, and not just for graphical purposes but for compute purposes too. So Llano is a big deal for the company even though it’s only a taste of what’s to come.
The second purpose of course was to provide sessions for developers to learn more about how to utilize AMD’s GPUs for compute and graphics tasks. Microsoft, Acceleware, Adobe, academic researchers, and others were on hand to provide talks on how they’re using GPUs in current and future projects.
The final purpose – and what is going to be most interesting to most outside observers – was to prepare developers for what’s coming down the pipe. AMD has big plans for the future and it’s important to get developers involved as soon as is reasonably possible so that they’re ready to use AMD’s future technologies when they launch. Over the next few days we’ll talk about a couple of different things AMD is working on, and today we’ll start with the first and most exciting project: AMD Graphics Core Next.
Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the architectural basis for AMD’s future GPUs, both for discrete products and for GPUs integrated with CPUs as part of AMD’s APU products. AMD will be instituting a major overhaul of its traditional GPU architecture for future generation products in order to meet the direction of the market and where they want to go with their GPUs in the future.
While graphics performance and features have been and will continue to be important aspects of a GPU’s design, AMD and the rest of the market have been moving towards further exploiting the compute capabilities of GPUs, which in the right circumstances are capable of being utilized as massive parallel processors that can complete a number of tasks in the fraction of the time as a highly generalized CPU. Since the introduction of shader-capable GPUs in 2002, GPUs have slowly evolved to become more generalized so that their resources can be used for more than just graphics. AMD’s most recent shift was with their VLIW4 architecture with Cayman late last year; now they’re looking to make their biggest leap yet with GCN.
GCN at its core is the basis of a GPU that performs well at both graphical and computing tasks. AMD has stretched their traditional VLIW architecture as far as they reasonably can for computing purposes, and as more developers get on board for GPU computing a clean break is needed in order to build a better performing GPU to meet their needs. This is in essence AMD’s Fermi: a new architecture and a radical overhaul to make a GPU that is as monstrous at computing as it is at graphics. And this is the story of the architecture that AMD will be building to make it happen.
Finally, it should be noted that the theme of AFDS 2011 was heterogeneous computing, as it has become AMD’s focus to get developers to develop heterogeneous applications that effectively utilize both AMD’s CPUs and AMD’s GPUs. Ostensibly AFDS is a conference about GPU computing, but AMD’s true strength is not their CPU side or their GPU side, it’s the combination of the two. Bulldozer will be the first half of AMD’s future APUs, while GCN will be the other half.
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hammer256 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
It's good to see AMD more committed to the GPGPU. I use GPGPU for neural network simulations, and currently the default choice has been Nvidia with CUDA. It would be nice to see some competition in this space.From the article it sounds like AMD knows to put a lot of emphasis on the software side of things for the developers. Hopefully they'll have a capable programming system that's as good as CUDA, maybe even better.
Finally, Given AMD's strategies in the past with medium sized GPU chips and multi-GPU for high-end, hopefully they'll put sufficient emphasis into support for easier multi-GPU programming.
Exciting times indeed.
krumme - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
What a pleasure to read articles like this. I would gladly pay for it, more directly, so to speak.Some animations or video, especially for us less tech savvy, would be highly appriciated too.
Competition for x86 is comming ! :)
mczak - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
I wouldn't really call it radical, Cayman already had the same theoretic 1/2 performance for FP64 adds compared to FP32. Muls/FMAs though are now 1/2 too it seems (though it might not extend to all products) whereas it was 1/4 on Cayman. Still, a factor two is not what I'd call a "radical" improvement.ahmedz_1991 - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
I really appreciated the letters A M D. Since Athlon, one could feel that AMD is lagging behind Intel more and more, but now with them beingh the first successful CPU\GPU combination (Llano out there now ) now AMD can make their own way and API's even into OS's just like what Intel and NVidia always do. This way I'm more than sure that we'll see titles (apps and games ) with the unified AMD brand instead of those ( meant to be played ) or ( smart solution ) with some stupid stars for Core i3,5 or 7frozentundra123456 - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - link
Well, technically Sandy Bridge is also a CPU/GPU combination, and I think I would call it successful. Granted, the graphics are not up to AMD levels, but their CPU performance is much better. And considering the debacle of Bulldozer and the architecture that was not optimized for current software, AMD will have to do a much better job of integrating their hardware with software than they have done so far.haukionkannel - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
So maybe not big upgrades in graphic power, but improvement in computing power. Its really good for CPGPU usage. It allso makes it easier to run physic calculations in AMD GPUs.Hmm... It allso means that more silicon space is neede for same graphic power...
Interesting to see how it all sums up.
Targon - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
Right now, there has been a shortage of software that really pushes the graphics limits, mostly because you have the substandard Intel graphics out there that still has a significant market share. How many games out there really make you feel that a Radeon 6970 just isn't enough? The polygon count for objects(characters) in games have not been going up as much as more world detail has been going in.Now, when developers want to try aiming for 5 million polygon figures in games, THAT is where there will be a bigger demand for more graphics power, and with that level of detail, the CPU power needed to properly animate the objects needs to be higher. This is where all of this work with GPU compute comes in, to handle all the complexities of properly animating these super-high detailed objects.
I will note that The Witcher 2 is one of the first games I have seen in a long time where CPU power needs to be higher than a Phenom 2 945, and I am waiting for the AMD Bulldozer core CPUs(not APUs) to come out to see how big of an improvement it will make.
IlllI - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
can someone explain all this to me? lol this is all beyond my understandingtipoo - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
They are making GPU compute much more capable and possible, in a nutshell. This will greatly increase the processing speed of many tasks on computers.khimera2000 - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
AMD has CPU and GPU, but there seperate. They want this to change.There combining the CPU and GPU so that they are more able to talk to each other, and do the tasks there best at. this is done by remaking the way they build video cards.
C++... great for CPU not so great for gpu... they want to change this.
Out of order operations suck on the GPU. they want to change this, so it can hammer through more work faster.
There also throwing in a bunch of tools to help tell developers where there messing up in this regard.
fusion APUs will have a nice trick... they will be able to talk to each other without needing to send information back to memory. Imagion passing letters but having to use fedex, this would be like a move to passing letters in class (no fedex) its quicker :) and your mail isint delayed.
APU will talk over PCI-E... Im wondering how that will work to 0.o