Firts off, I've been gone a bit so I apologize if this has already been discussed.

I've been thinking a lot about AMD's aquisition of ATI and at first, for a long time, I thought it was the worst move they could have made. It seemed pure idiocy to make such a huge acquisition at a critical time where they should have been pouring money int R&D for a new chip to beat Intel.

I see now that I was wrong.

Instead of reacting to Intel's new assault, AMD has been acting. Acting and thinking in new ways. Even so far to be considered a paradigm.

If AMD can take ATI's GPU technology and optomize it well enough to be used as a massively parallel execution engine AMD has a chance to be THE supplier of major computational horsepower.

For example, if you could have a general purpose execution engine performing at 300Gflops, and you can connect four of them using HTT 3.0 in a 1U format, that would turn some heads, would it not? Maybe use 65nm uarch to keep the heat and power requirements down.

I suspect that AMD might be trying to use 4x4 as a smokescreen to conceal their REAL next move with ATI's technology. I believe AMD means to move most of their resources out of the consumer/enthusiast space and into this new area of computing. They have a REAL chance of completely dominating, and dominating in ways that Intel may or may not fully realize yet. In fact AMD might have a shot at crushing Sun and IBM and Cray in terms of raw deployable computing horsepower.

I do wonder though if AMD has tipped their hand a little too early. I don't suppose it matters too much one way or the other. It will however be interesting to me to see if this is conjecture on my part or if it is what's really going on behind AMD's closed doors.

I know if I had a chance to take over the computing world in this fashion, I know I would be all over it too.

In december amd is supposed to release 65 nm stuff

Very true, but what I'm thinking about will take more time.

It will take a while for AMD to figure out how to adapt GPU tech to be used for efficient parallel computing and then shrunk to 65nm.

Thank you for your reply JumpingJack.

You touched a great deal on the rest of my thoughts that I was having, especially about the Cell processor.

I didn't know that Intel was heading in the same direction either.

Heh, sorry, I do get excited from time to time about what i see.

Do you think mixed-type chips will really be big? What I was writing about was pure execution in massive parallel in large clusters or workstations. General purpose stuff. Do you see mixed type chips (encoding, audio, video circuits on one die or MB) filtering down to the consumers?

Definitely a lot for me to think about.

Ohhhh, yeah --- hetrogeneous multicore processors are where the industry is headed. IBM/Sony pretty much demonstrated (and are selling) a prototype (Cell). Both Rattner (Justin Rattner of Intel) and Fred Weber (formerly of AMD) touted the Cell as a design ahead of it's time. They are right, this is the direction the microprocessor is going.

I am fuzzy though on how product differentiation will work... the CPU found it's utility in being multi-purpose. But if one divides the CPU into parallel modules, then the strength of the chip derives from the weighted mix of the processing cores you throw in... for example, say AMD makes a CPU/GPU/Multimedia Video crunching CPU with 16 cores.

One unit might look like:
6 CPU, 6 GPU, 4 Multimedia (balanced)

Another might look like:
3 CPU, 10 GPU, 3 Multimedia (3D/Graphics heavy)

Etc. etc.

The CPU becomes 'non' multipurpose and this restricts my choices as a consumer/user/enthusiast to pick and select the best of the best. If it all is wrapped up in one package, how can I selectively add 'GPU strength'.

I think this is where Torrenza technology will play a huge huge role.

Jack

Much as I agree with you Jack, the enthusiasts are going to have hours of fun deciding if 3 CPUs and 11 GPUs is better than 4 CPUs and 10 GPUs or 5 CPUs and 9 GPUs etc....


Heh.... I forsee an era where there is no "best" CPU, they all have advatages in different tasks, hell they all have advantages in different games, some of which are more CPU intensive and some of which are more Gfx intrensive.

I think we will not see parallel processing as quite the spread that you appear to be thinking.

I think future CPU's will function in a more hierarchal parallel way than purely parallel.

I see what you're saying Jack. And I agree that the technology is heading towards unification. Heh, guess kinda like the recent unification of shaders and whatnot on graphics cards.

GPU's on the CPU die though. If GPU on CPU die is what you're talking about ( or even in a CPU type socket) there must be some kind of new high speed memory solution. Any GPU would be somewhat crippled by the limits of a motherboard bus, would it not? And would the costs of such a high speed bandwidth rich system be feasible?

Unless there's something I don't know about (most likely) then the fastest application of AMD's aquisition of ATI is to produce a multi Gflop capable processor as a drop in solution for something like torrenza. This is what I got so excited over earlier.

If AMD can get that done, maybe they can squeeze some more performance towards the consumer without raising prices too high.

Thanks for all the posts, very interesting reading for me.

Thanks Jack.

Another thing that I was looking at is that if it doesn't take too much optimization to turn a GPU into a drop-in parallel execution unit, then AMD could offer the enterprise market a powerful computing solution for a fraction of the cost of a large cluster.

From recent articles on ATI and nVidia GPU's seem a nearly ready-made powerhouse.

Now if only they could reduce the heat output from the GPU's. But as has probably been said before, that might just happen with the eventual progression to smaller processes.
Excellent thread by the way. I just wonder what kind of avatar would match such an interesting name. I too hope to see you stick around.

Agreed, nice to see someone who can post something of intellectual value (unlike myself ). I think it's nice to read, and gives me a nice insight into what is actually happening within the CPU industry.

I've read a bit about the idea of the multi core cpu/gpu/multimedia thing and it sets me to wondering what will happen to the enthusiast market.

From what I've read, Vista will be locked down with only one change allowed before either a new copy of Vista has to be bought or a special allowance is made by Microsoft to reactivate it. If that's really the case, system modifications will drop to almost zero. A person would pretty much be stuck with running the computer as it was first bought or built. This multi purpose cpu/gpu thing would fit right in with that, since once the choice was made, it would be locked in until a whole new multi processor was bought. One Vista license, one multi cpu, not real changes allowed.

The enthusiast would be limited to making his/her selection at the time of build, thus encouraging him to buy the best, most expensive available, because the idea of buying a part that was only average and then upgrading later would be lost. Yeah, good for the companies sellign hardware, but bad for the enthusiast.

Just some further thoughts. Don't know if it will happen or not, or is close in some way but not in another. All we can do is just wait and see what happens.

They said the same thing about Windows XP with upgrading components.

I read in Maximum PC that integrating a CPU and GPU on a single die would take time that could potentially partially obsolete both the CPU and GPU, so that "Fusion"-like products would be relegated to the mid-range market. That, and the convinience or replacing a discrete CPU or GPU independent of the other would be lost.
I wonder if we'll eventually get MP motherboards with two Socket 1207 sockets so you could drop in an AMD CPU and an ATI GPU then connect them with an HT bus, that way they could be offered as discrete products.

Having one socket for CPU and one for GPU is something i've been mulling over too. But even with HT 3.0 I believe the memory bandwidth hungry GPU would quickly overwhelm the bus.

Maybe if they put in a dedicated GPU memory bus? I don't know. I'm waiting (impatiently) to see what the hardware manufacturers comes up with.

The Fusion products would probably serve a great many low to mid range consumer systems quite well though.

this is a great thread actually worth reading, thanks everybody for great information, thoughts, and ideas on where computers are heading.

Now here is my two cents worth of where i think they might go with the new chips eventually. I think they will get around to where there is one die/core made up of 100s of multipurpose calculation units. then depending on the tasks being done, the system w