AMD Fusion System Architecture Overview - Southern Isle GPUs and Beyond

[news 28]

At AMDÂ’s Fusion 11 conference, we were treated to a nice overview of

AMDÂ’s next generation graphics architecture. With the recent change

in their lineup going from the previous VLIW-5 setup (powered their

graphics chips from the Radeon HD 2900 through the latest “Barts” chip

running the HD 6800 series) to the new VLIW-4 (HD 6900), many were not

expecting much from AMD in terms of new and unique designs. The

upcoming “Southern Isles” were thought to be based on the current

VLIW-4 architecture, and would feature more performance and a few new

features due to the die shrink to 28 nm. It turns out that

speculation is wrong.

 

URL: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Fusion-System-Architecture-Overview-Southern-Isle-GPUs-and-Beyond

 

Quote: "This is a big deal for AMD. While they have had trouble

keeping up with Intel on the CPU side, we can see that they have had

no problems staying ahead with graphics. Their push towards

heterogeneous computing is also shared with NVIDIA, and their combined

efforts towards utilizing this functionality will benefit both in the

long run. Intel is still more CPU-centric, but we are starting to see

them taking a larger interest in this technology. The cancelled

Larabee project may have been misguided in terms of addressing the

gaming and graphics market, but the parallel computing ramifications

of this part and its extreme programmability hint at things to come."

 

Thanks for posting out news!

 

Ryan Shrout

PC Perspective

rshrout ( -at -) pcper.com