AMD shows off new Fusion processors, and HP, Microsoft and ARM support

Company aims for 10 teraflop future

The signage is coming down and delegates are returning home, but the impact of the AMD Fusion developer's conference will be felt for quite some time to come.

Over the last week the company has laid out plans for a new series of Fusion processors that look to merge GPU and CPU operations, announced new deals with HP and Microsoft on cooperation and joined with ARM in pushing open standards. But it saved the biggest shift for last - a complete reworking of its graphics processing unit (GPU) with a radical new architecture.

The next-generation GPU architecture will be the biggest shake-up in AMD's technology for over a decade. The company has relied on MIMD (multiple-instruction-stream, multiple-data-stream) architecture for its graphics processors pretty much since its inception. This technology offers a number of advantages, but is fundamentally limited by the need for a strong complier and in processing ability.

Chief technical officer Eric Demers outlined the new platform, which would shift to SIMD (single-instruction-stream, multiple-data-stream)-based architecture with MIMD capabilities, and would offer huge performance increases with boosts to multi-threading bandwidth.

Best of all, older software would not need to be rewritten, he told developers at the conference. The first system using the new architecture should be out within a year and AMD has a roadmap going forward for the next three years.

"I hope you'll walk out of here and say to yourself that AMD really has direction going forward," he said.

The new architecture is a further step beyond the other big hardware news of the conference - the launch of the A-Series Fusion chips, formerly codenamed Llano. The chips are what AMD is calling applications processing units, since they blur the distinction between CPU and GPU operation.

"It's an interesting concept, the blurring of the lines between the GPU and CPU and saying neither matter any more," Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told V3.co.uk. "It's great utopian PR speak. But the two companies that AMD has to deal with on the competitive front are Intel and Nvidia, and both of those have a firm investment in advanced CPU and GPU technology."

AMD shows off new Fusion processors, and HP, Microsoft and ARM support

Company aims for 10 teraflop future

The Fusion range mixes two or four x86 CPUs with Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs into a system that AMD says can outperform Intel's entry-level Core range of processors, and use less power to do so. A battery life of up to ten hours could be achieved on a standard laptop, said the company.

The move is needed, given Intel's improved graphics performance with the latest Sandy Bridge Core processors, but AMD seems to be concentrating on mid-range systems so that it can compete on price as well as performance.

HP was the first to announce systems based around the Fusion processors, something that surprised conference attendee Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group.

"Fusion's a nice product, and HP will have a lot of lines it can put it on, so AMD's on to a good thing," he told V3.co.uk. "Typically, HP doesn't give that kind of love to AMD, and this week HP gave them a lot."

But for all the fuss about Fusion, there was little talk of Bulldozer, he said. Companies have been waiting and waiting for this to arrive, but very little was said on the topic. A lot of people in the industry are getting sick of waiting and, with Intel's portfolio looking very good indeed, AMD risks falling behind at the higher end of the market.

HP wasn't the only company showing support for AMD. Microsoft, which is located just a few miles down the road from this year's conference, gave a keynote speech expounding the future of the two companies.

Microsoft said the next version of the Visual Studio developer suite would include support for C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP). This allows C++ developers to quickly adapt their code to run on massive parallel architectures, speeding performance over ten times, and even taking advantage of cloud resources for processing.

Having Microsoft on its side could have a huge impact on the popularity of the AMD architecture, especially since C++ is still one of the most commonly used programming environments in use for these kinds of applications. Closer ties between AMD and Microsoft look likely, Enderle said.

"When Intel did vPro, Microsoft had a major partnership malfunction," he explained. "As a result, Microsoft is suddenly a lot friendlier with AMD. Intel getting into the software and tools business across the range worries Redmond."

AMD shows off new Fusion processors, and HP, Microsoft and ARM support

Company aims for 10 teraflop future

Another unlikely ally was British chip firm – and increasingly an AMD rival – ARM. Jem Davies, ARM Fellow and vice president of technology, gave a keynote speech in which he explained that the companies were in complete agreement on many issues.

"It may seem strange that AMD has invited ARM to come and talk to you and in some ways it is," he said. "Much of what we believe about the direction the technology industry is going in, in terms of heterogeneous computing, there's huge agreement between us."

Developers need open standards and must be able to use their code on the plethora of new devices coming online as the ‘internet of things' develops, he said. Open standards would be essential and AMD and ARM would work together to focus on a few key standards.

"Both of them are huge OpenCL backers as a cross-platform architecture environment," Enderle said. "A partnership with OpenCL, rather than a proprietary architecture, will be interesting to both for moving hardware."

AMD began the show with an ambitious roadmap, claiming processors capable of 10 teraflops by 2020. While the company has demonstrated the first steps to that lofty goal, Pund-IT's King remained unconvinced of the company's future. "They are a company that's still creating interesting technology, but sorely lacks overall strategic vision," he said.

"AMD's one of those companies that's been waiting for the next big thing. Llano and Bulldozer are supposed to be it, but for the last decade things have not been very satisfactory."