AMD's Graphics Core Next Preview: AMD's New GPU, Architected For Compute
by Ryan Smith on December 21, 2011 9:38 PM ESTPrelude: The History of VLIW & Graphics
Before we get into the nuts & bolts of Graphics Core Next, perhaps it’s best to start at the bottom, and then work our way up.
The fundamental unit of AMD’s previous designs has been the Streaming Processor, previously known as the SPU. In every modern AMD design other than Cayman (6900), this is a Very Long Instruction Word 5 (VLIW5) design; Cayman reduced this to VLIW4. As implied by the architectural name, each SP would in turn have 5 or 4 fundamental math units – what AMD now calls Radeon cores – which executed the individual instructions in parallel over as many clocks as necessary. Radeon cores were coupled with registers, a branch unit, and a special function (transcendental) unit as necessary to complete the SP.
VLIW designs are designed to excel at executing many operations from the same task in parallel by breaking it up into smaller groupings called wavefronts. In AMD’s case a wavefront is a group of 64 pixels/values and the list of instructions to be executed against them. Ideally, in a wavefront a group of 4 or 5 instructions will come down the pipe and be completely non-interdependent, allowing every Radeon core to be fed. When dependent instructions would come down however, fewer instructions could be scheduled at once, and in the worst case only a single instruction could be scheduled. VLIW designs will never achieve perfect efficiency in this regard, but the farther real world utilization is from ideal efficiency, the weaker the benefits of VLIW.
The use of VLIW can be traced back to the first AMD DX9 GPU, R300 (Radeon 9700 series). If you recall our Cayman launch article, we mentioned that AMD initially used a VLIW design in those early parts because it allowed them to process a 4 component dot product (e.g. w, x, y, z) and a scalar component (e.g. lighting) at the same time, which was by far the most common graphics operation. Even when moving to unified shaders in DX10 with R600 (Radeon HD 2900), AMD still kept the VLIW5 design because the gaming market was still DX9 and using those kinds of operations. But as new games and GPGPU programs have come out efficiency has dropped over time, and based on AMD’s own internal research at the time of the Cayman launch the average shader program was utilizing only 3.4 out of 5 Radeon cores. Shrinking from VLIW5 to VLIW4 fights this some, but utilization will always be a concern.
Finally, it’s worth noting what’s in charge of doing all of the scheduling. In the CPU world we throw things at the CPU and let it schedule actions as necessary – it can even go out-of-order (OoO) within a thread if it will be worth it. With VLIW, scheduling is the domain of the compiler. The compiler gets the advantage of knowing about the full program ahead of time and can intelligently schedule some things well in advance, but at the same time it’s blind to other conditions where the outcome is unknown until the program is run and data is provided. Because of this the schedule is said to be static – it’s set at the time of compilation and cannot be changed in-flight.
So why in an article about AMD Graphics Core Next are we going over the quick history of AMD’s previous designs? Without understanding the previous designs, we can’t understand what is new about what AMD is doing, or more importantly why they’re doing it.
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haplo602 - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
I hope that AMD delivers. This is exactly what I expected them to do once Llano was anounced. GPU as a coprocessor. Actualy I hoped that AMD would implement a HTX capable GPU, so I can just plug it into a C32 socket (for example) along with an Opteron.The future past Trinity looks interesting.
jamescox - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
It would be interesting if they produced a form factor with CPU+GPU on a separate card with memory. Ever since AMD moved the memory controller on die, I wondered if we would see CPU + memory on a separate card. It seems to make a lot of sense. A 4 socket motherboard is huge, especially where each socket has 4 to 6 memory slots associated with it. If the CPU and memory were on a separate card, then you could pack them a lot denser, like you can run 4 GPUs off an ATX board now. It might be cheaper than a massive 4 socket board also. I don't know how many HT links you can run through a slot, but you could always use extra cables/connectors like they use for multiple graphics cards.With the GPU using the same memory space as the CPU, then why leave the CPU attached to the slow system memory? Just put one of these hybrid chips attached to some high-speed graphics card like memory on a separate board. Move the slow system memory out to the chipset again. The current memory hierarchy is not exactly optimal in my opinion. I am using a slightly older macbook pro, which only supports 3 GB of memory. With all of the stuff I run, it is paging a lot to a super slow laptop hard drive. I have been tempted to get an SSD to speed it up rather than a new laptop.
Anyway, with the way the memory hierarchy works now, system memory is kind of like a cache for the swap space on disk. System memory has gotten a lot faster, but disk have not, so people are using SSDs to fill the gap. If you directly connect the "graphics memory" to a CPU/GPU combo, then you don't need as much total memory in the system because you would not need multiple copies of the data. You would just pass pointers to data back and forth between the CPU and GPU components.
Also, it would be nice to switch to something non-volatile for the memory connected to the chipset; just use disk as mass storage only. "System" memory wouldn't need to be that fast, since you would probably have a GB or two of high-speed memory on each processor board. The "system" memory would be used more like the SSD boot/swap drive in a current system. I don't think flash is quite there yet, and the other types of non-volatile memory (magnetic RAM , phase-shift RAM, etc) that promise much better performance and durability seem to still be all talk with no real products.
With keeping the current form factor, it would be nice if they could put a large amount of memory in with the CPU/GPU package to act as high-speed memory for the GPU and L4 cache for the CPU. This form factor doesn't support scaling up to multiple chips easily (too large of main-board), but it would be very power efficient for laptops and other small form factor systems. It would require very little off-module communication which saves a lot of power. Maybe they could use a low-power, wide-interface dram chip originally meant for mobile devices.
Hopefully Trinity is more than just a meaningless code name...
Quantumboredom - Sunday, June 19, 2011 - link
On page 4 ("Many SIMDs Make One Compute Unit") there are two figures showing wavefront scheduling on VLIW4 versus GCN. As I read it the figures seem to indicate that in VLIW4, one 4-wide VLIW handles operations from four wavefronts in parallel, but that's not how I've understood AMD's VLIW4. Only a single work-item is executing on a VLIW4-core at any point in time, the occupancy problems of VLIW4 come from ILP within a work-item, not across wavefronts.At any one point in time, a Cayman/VLIW4 compute unit is only executing instructions from a single wavefront (though they need at least two wavefronts to switch between on VLIW4). Again at any one point in time only 16 work-items are actually being executed, and it's within those 16 work-items that ILP must be extraced to fill the VLIW4 units. Since each work-item is executing on a VLIW4-processor, a total of 16*4=64 operations can be done in parallel, but that requires ILP within the work-items.
On GCN this is quite different, where the four 16-wide vector units are actually executing 64 work-items at a time (four times as many as in Cayman). However the point is that each of these work-items are basically executing on a scalar processor, there's no need for ILP anymore. So again we are executing 64 operations in parallel, but now without any need for ILP.
At least this is how I understood the presentation (I was at AFDS). Basically I agree with how the GCN scheduling is illustrated in this article, but the Cayman part looks wrong to me. A Cayman CU can only execute one wavefront at a time, and it only needs two wavefronts to switch between to be able to fully utilize the hardware, not four like the figures here seem to suggest.
Now I'm just a programmer, not an architecture guy, so if anyone could clear this up for me it would be greatly appreciated :)
Ryan Smith - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
Hi Quantum;After further consideration you're basically right. I should have made a distinction in the figures between instructions and wholly distinct wavefronts. While there are some ILP considerations to be had, basically the elements Cayman accepts should all be instructions from the same wavefront rather than different wavefronts. Cayman can't really work on multiple wavefronts at once.
I don't have the original files on me, but we'll get this fixed in the morning to show that Cayman is consuming multiple instructions from the same wavefront.
-Thanks
Ryan Smith
jamescox - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
Would a CPU/GPU integrated chip only be a replacement for integrated graphics, or does it have the possibility to move a little farther up? With multi-threading, 4 to 8 thread CPUs will be common in the mainstream, but that will not be a very big die on smaller processes. Most PC software doesn't make use of more than 4 compute intensive threads, so how much room does that leave for GPU hardware? If they solve the memory speed problem by integrating some high-speed memory into the socket (multi-chip module), or something, then it seems like they could possibly get more mainstream performance out of an integrated chip.
If the integrated GPU isn't being used for graphics, then I really don't see that much software that would use it for compute in the PC space. One of the main things mentioned was usually video encode/decode, but it seems that the best solution is to include specific media encode/decode hardware like sandy bridge does. It seems to be just as fast and much more power efficient. If AMD doesn't include a media processing engine, then that could still be a reason to go with Intel. What other PC software could use the compute power?
There is plenty of software that could use it in professional/HPC markets, so it makes sense to make a GPU that can be used for both if it doesn't sacrifice the graphics performance. The newest generations of GPUs have some things in common with Larrabee and Sony's Cell processors, except both of those tried to move too much of the graphics processing abilities into software. AMD didn't make that mistake, but talk of compute abilities for GPUs in the PC/consumer space seems a bit premature without any real applications to take advantage of it.
GaMEChld - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
Llano already has low level discrete GPU performance, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. You are correct that on smaller processes they will be able to allocate more space to the GPU while maintaining CPU performance. I believe the successor to Trinity (which is the Bulldozer based successor to Llano) is supposed to be on 28nm. If everything goes exactly right, you could potentially have some kind of monster that has i5-2500K CPU performance with Radeon 6800 GPU performance in some maintstream laptop chip a year or two down the road. (Those numbers are all pure speculation)I encourage everyone to take a moment and remember the first computer you ever used, just to pay homage to what we are capable of as a species in just a few short years.
I remember an IBM computer flipped on by a big red toggle that took 2 minutes to boot to a dos prompt...
Targon - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
I remember the Timex Sinclaire, with 2KB of memory standard hooked up to a black and white TV and cassette tapes to save/load programs. Z80 running at 1MHz...the old 5.25 inch floppies were MUCH better, at least you could get a list of what was on the storage medium without having to load it.jabber - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
If only our attitudes to each other and other issues had advanced as much as well.GaMEChld - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
"Because in the end, aren't all religions the same? They tell us what to eat, when to pray, that this lump of clay called Man can somehow shape himself to resemble the divine. But we can never attain that perfect grace if we have hatred in our hearts. So let us celebrate our commonalites. Some of us don't eat pork. Some of us don't eat shellfish. But we all eat chicken. So spread the word: peace and chicken!"~HOMER SIMPSON
:-D
Cyber.Angel - Saturday, October 15, 2011 - link
off-topic?7th day Adventist don't eat meat, yes, not even chicken
AND
in Christian religion it's God who sacrifices, not human
PLUS
there is a requirement of TOTAL change according to Jesus
That is, the "ME" is buried, forgotten and God lives inside of you
meaning a total change in life
God bless America - but...where is the change?