AMD to Disclose Details About Bulldozer Micro-Architecture in August

[madcho]

Any information given for software for fusion ? I would looking to know if the gpu part will be used like a co-processor with some actual or new instructions.

And the question i'm really asking myself, is ; Did AMD integrated old x87 or remplaced fully by SSE ? It's die space not anymore really used.

[JF-AMD]

Any information given for software for fusion ? I would looking to know if the gpu part will be used like a co-processor with some actual or new instructions.

And the question i'm really asking myself, is ; Did AMD integrated old x87 or remplaced fully by SSE ? It's die space not anymore really used.

Any GPU co-processing is going to come via either directcompute or OpenCL at this point. I doubt you would see us do anything proprietary, we've been pretty strong advocates of standards, especially when it comes to fusion. The fastest way to kill the technology is to make it proprietary (ie. Cuda). I talk to a lot of customers who are excited about cuda but wary to do any real software work on it for fear that their efforts could fall by the wayside because nvidia could decide to head in a different direction.

There is always the discussion that you can wrap cuda in OpenCL to remove the risk, but that just leads to one more layer in the software model which is more effort and one more layer of debugging if something goes wrong.

[madcho]

Any GPU co-processing is going to come via either directcompute or OpenCL at this point. I doubt you would see us do anything proprietary, we've been pretty strong advocates of standards, especially when it comes to fusion. The fastest way to kill the technology is to make it proprietary (ie. Cuda). I talk to a lot of customers who are excited about cuda but wary to do any real software work on it for fear that their efforts could fall by the wayside because nvidia could decide to head in a different direction.

There is always the discussion that you can wrap cuda in OpenCL to remove the risk, but that just leads to one more layer in the software model which is more effort and one more layer of debugging if something goes wrong.

I would be disapointed serously if AMD choose to take an API for use the accelerator.

The best was to "simply" extand x86-64 to a new instruction set.

Yes not an easy work, but would be a lot faster to get performance improvement, update compilers and re-compile code.

And kill that f*cking x87, free some die space.

And JF : directcompute is proprietary.

[Chumbucket843]

I would be disapointed serously if AMD choose to take an API for use the accelerator.

The best was to "simply" extand x86-64 to a new instruction set.

API's provide a level of abtraction that is very useful for targeting different hardware. the only reason to use x86 would be for saving costs on designing the ISA. x86-64 is essentially x86 with 2x registers and 64bit support. at its core it is still plagued with the performance issues of x86. it's very wasteful and consequentially instruction decoding is a bottleneck in virtually every x86 cpu.

what you have suggested has sort of been done with SSE. i have wondered what a cpu that just did SSE would be capable of in terms of performance and compatibility, it's probably not so great. when you have that much compute density you really need to save memory bandwidth with streaming. SSE doesnt handle that as well as it could.

Yes not an easy work, but would be a lot faster to get performance improvement, update compilers and re-compile code.

And kill that f*cking x87, free some die space.

you dont update a compiler for a new architecture or in some cases even extensions, you start from scratch. that's why compilers take forever to mature.

And JF : directcompute is proprietary.

which has advantages over an open standard such as being much faster to support new features, no board of people filibustering API's = things get done.

also directcompute is arguably more vender neutral that opencl or opengl. khronos group allows for proprietary extensions in OGL&OCL where as DC doesnt. nvidia sort of abuses the extension system which is no surprise.