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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EJ257 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
I can't believe it's been 6 years since the X360 and PS3 release. It seems like this latest generation of consoles stuck around a lot longer than previous versions did. Any speculations on what kind of hardware MS and Sony will throw into the next gen?DanNeely - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
They have. The big console makers, at the gave devs requests, were trying to make the current generation last a decade to allow more time to recover the work expended figuring out how to best program them. The motion capture cameras were supposed to be the thing that kept the platforms from getting too stale. I suspect however, that by planning to launch its new console early Nintendo may have blown those plans out of the water.jabber - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure the hardware specs for both the next Xbox and Playstation have been set in stone already.I'm still betting on a 2013 release too.
So right now GPU wise I reckon we're looking at GPUs currently sitting in the $100 range for both boxes. By 2013, the cost of these chips (suitably modified) will be down to $15 -$10 a box.
I wouldnt have thought anything higher than a 5770 or 450 would be suitable/required.
Targon - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
It all depends on what you expect. Things feel a bit stagnant on the PC game front because consoles are not evolving, and too many companies want almost exactly the same experience on the PC version as what you have on the console.Stargrazer - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
Something doesn't feel right here. In itself, SIMD is about *Data* Level Parallelism, not Thread Level Parallelism. Sure, you could use SIMD units as part of some larger scheme that exploits TLP, but that's not what *SIMD* is about.
Loki726 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
If you use a strict definition of a SIMD programming model, then yes, you are probably right: SIMD is a single sequence of operations executed over multiple data elements.However, over time SIMD has been used to refer to both the aforementioned programming model and the hardware used to implement it. The hardware typically consists of a single control unit that broadcasts instructions to multiple functional units. When people say "a SIMD", they typically mean that hardware implementation rather than the computing model.
If that wasn't confusing enough, in the 1980s GPUs started using that SIMD hardware to execute multiple threads as long as the threads were all executing the same instruction at the same time.
So the statement about using "a SIMD" to exploit TLP is accurate, if you take "a SIMD" to mean a processor pipeline with a single control unit that broadcasts to multiple functional units, and have some scheme for scheduling threads onto functional units.
RedemptionAD - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
It seems like a good thing potentially. I hope that their good intentions are followed with good execution, at least better than Fermi.Targon - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
It should be interesting going forward. Now that AMD is finally into the 32nm process node, standalone GPUs also stand to gain quite a bit. As long as graphics don't become an afterthought to GPGPU, AMD should be in good shape. Radeon 7970(if that is the next generation GPU) may really be a game changer.Navier - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
Will the GCN architecture be able to be virtualized? Can a VMWare/XEN/KVM/HyperV hypervisor create vGPUs accessible by VMs in much the same way as vCPUs are today? With GPUs being integrated within the CPU package it would be a waste of resources if it could not be virtualized.This will become a critical feature for enterprise computing beyond HPC applications. One example would be gaming in a cloud computing environment, where a company provides a service that runs a game on their compute and graphics hardware for a game and streams the output to your mobile device for you to enjoy.
hechacker1 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
Yeah I'm also curious about this. Perhaps with the IOMMU and other CPU like features that the GPU now has, it would be much easier to timeshare the GPU.