AMD finally fleshed out the "Asset Smart" strategy it has been talking about since, at least, last December. The result: AMD is now fabless.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
RE[2]: Good Move But Not Good Enough
Member since:2005-07-08
Okay, I was curious to see what it is that makes you and others think Savain is babbing on about that you call BS.
Well as a veteran hardware software engineer, I would say most of the comments against him are pathetic. No wonder OSNews has gotten so utterly boring recently, nobody knows anything about the past and what will have to be reinvented again. On his blog he appears to have reinvented what we in the hardware (VLSI) industry have been doing for 4+ decades, expressing concurrency in a more hardware like fashion using event driven cycle simulation. I still have to fathom if there is anything else there beyond what I am familiar with. If everyone started modding me off to <0, I'd probably get pissed too and walk away.
Two decades ago there was a parallel processor that was easy to write concurrent programs for and map onto any number of available communicating processors. Typically 1-1000 cores were used in various apps with little change to the code, but those were 4KB/chip days and the apps were very much DSP like. The hardware is long gone but the || model still works in CSP based languages that can run on x86, not sure how well it exploits multiple x86 cores though. The model is very similar to hardware design languages, model processes as communicating hardware objects. I could say APL, Occam, ADA, various CSP languages, Verilog, VHDL, Matlab, even Haskell etc all fall into a hardware -software continuum. All of those have been used to express hardware designs which is inherently parallel.
He is right about one thing though, todays x86 really does suck in so many ways, it is very fast in some things like Video Codecs (extreme cache locality) but in practice is many orders slower when dealing with highly unordered memory requests. It all boils down to that pesky Memory Wall, true random accesses are now 1000s times slower than the aggregate datapaths. Going to 64b address space and having many cores only worsens this. What is the point of having 4 or more cores when even the 1st one is under utilized due to this wall.
One can remedy this somewhat by starting with a memory system using a low latency RL DRAM from Micron that is much closer in performance to the processor cycle speed. The penalty is that atleast 40 threads must be used per processor to hide the remaining memory latency, in effect trading a giant Memory Wall for a modest Thread Wall, and the memory costs more too. On this kind of processor, I would have no trouble partitioning the graphic compute intensive parts of my apps onto large numbers of threads. I really have no idea how to exploit todays hardware anymore. Even moving data around in memory is highly unpredicable, longer blocks take far more cycles per word. In the MVC type of app, only the View part is usually compute intensive but also easy to tile.
So what thesis do you propose to make parallel computing run well on the next AMD/Intel masterpiece? Enlighten me please.
As for AMD going fabless, that is sad, end of an era, as Jerry Sanders used to say so often, real men have fabs. I did work for one of AMDs parts a long time ago.
Member since:2005-07-06
YES! AMD should quickly come out with BREAKTHROUGH technology from their ASS to LEAP FROG over their enemies!
They should figure out how to efficiently spread out programs over multiple cores that aren't designed to efficiently scale to multiple cores! ITS SO EASY!
Edited 2008-10-08 18:25 UTC
Member since:2005-07-24
Well... he does bring up a good point. Both Intel and AMD have hit a barrier to being able to give us *faster* chips, and have turned to multicore and heavy PR and marketing to make people feel that they should continue upgrading to later, faster computers, while dumping the problem on programmers in a move which one might go so far as to call a cop out. I don't think the reality of this state of affairs gets enough press. And I am very skeptical that desktops are ever going to be parallelized to the extent that most users will ever benefit from the massive number of cores which are soon to come our way. In fact, I suspect we will suffer, as multithreaded code is going to be buggier and come with additional, hard to track down, race condition related issues. I'll stop short of saying that Intel and AMD are leading us straight to hell. "Down the garden path" may be a more appropriate phrase. It is critical to both companies that a demand for new processors continues, whether the consumer actually benefits from it... or not.
Update: BOINC projects will likely be big winners, though. ;-)
Edited 2008-10-08 19:30 UTC
Member since:
2006-05-09
This is a good move by Ruiz but it is not good enough, in my opinion. AMD is buying precious time so as to delay the inevitable disaster that is waiting around the corner. Instead of taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunity afforded by the parallel programming crisis to leapfrog over its main competitor with breakthrough technology, AMD chose to play the me-too fiddle. That is sad. But it is not too late for Hector Ruiz and Dirk Meyer to turn the company around and become the leader of the processor industry for decades to come. And then they can buy their old fab back, if they feel manly.
http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-solve-parallel-prog...
Edited 2008-10-08 17:25 UTC