HPCwire: AMD Sees a Heterogeneous Future

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

February 23, 2007

AMD Sees a Heterogeneous Future

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

Though not the largest market for either AMD or Intel, high performance computing has become a technology battleground for the two chipmakers. In the past few years, multi-core Opteron processors, HyperTransport technology, and the open standard Torrenza platform have propelled AMD to prominence in the high-end space. But with the introduction of Intel's new Xeon offerings, the game has changed for AMD.

Now, with last year's acquisition of graphics-card maker ATI, AMD appears to be pursuing a rather different path than its rival. To get a sense of how this is going to play out in the HPC landscape, HPCwire talked to Phil Hester, AMD Chief Technology Officer, and Bob Drebin, Chief Technology Officer for the company's new Graphics Products Group, about their vision for high-end processing and how this fits into AMD's overall business strategy.

HPCwire: Can you characterize AMD's high performance computing strategy?

Hester: It's a layered strategy. The top layer is generally what we refer to as accelerated computing. What this is basically trying to recognize is that workloads are getting more diverse, and that applies to both the client and the server space. Below this top layer of accelerated computing, there are at least two other elements.

One of these is the idea of Torrenza and being able to build specialized accelerators. An example of that would be the work done with GPUs and stream computing. There's also work we're doing with companies who use FPGAs for specialized acceleration, whether that would be Java, vector processing or whatever. We're also working with our key OEM customers, like Cray, to help them build custom silicon solutions on our Torrenza platform.

The third layer is really around what we see happening at the processor level itself with regards to the Fusion [CPU-GPU hybrid] processors. For a lot of workloads, the historic idea of more and more homogeneous cores is not the right answer. The better answer is a mix of heterogeneous cores. The first example of that will be a Fusion processor that is primarily aimed at the client space, driven by the fact that, with the advent of Vista, most of the applications that will run on desktop and mobile systems are going to require 3-D graphics.

There's an analogy to this in the early days of the PC. With an 80286-based PC and an open socket next to it for the 80287 math coprocessor, maybe one percent of the people bought the coprocessor. In the 80386 generation, with the 80387 socket, maybe 10 or 20 percent of the people bought the coprocessor. After the introduction of Windows and other emerging applications, the 80486 processor integrated the FP coprocessor because at that point enough of the applications demanded floating point. The economics was such that the incremental die size increase to incorporate floating-point capabilities just made sense. We're kind of to that point now in the client space [with graphics functionality].

With that said, once you put a GPU on-chip, you will be able to exploit the capability of that device to solve more general-purpose problems. That means that over time, you want to expose new native mode user instruction extensions that leverage the capabilities of the GPU. The other thing that you start recognizing is that GPUs, as essentially large vector units, are optimized for parallel execution. If you look at the performance of CPUs versus GPUs for applications that are parallelizable, the GPU has 20 to 50 times better performance. By being able to exploit both sequential and parallel applications on a single chip, it's kind of a perfect map to Amdahl's Law.

Although the original Fusion processor will be targeted for the client space, we also believe that a lot of the characteristics, such as power efficiency and performance per watt, will likely be a good building block for large clusters. As I'm sure you know, some of these clusters are not necessarily limited by an organization's budget, but by the amount of power and cooling that they can get into their data center. So one important metric for us is performance per watt per dollar.

The flip side of that is because every one these client CPUs has this graphics function integrated in it, it will never be designed to be the world's highest performance floating point device or GPU. We still believe that in the desktop and client space, there will continue to be a need for GPUs just as we know them today. And likewise, GPUs are going to continue to evolve to do, for example, true IEEE math. So our stream computing initiatives are the beginning points of figuring out how the GPU itself needs to evolve to become a more generalized element of a high performance technical computing solutions.

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html