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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 24 2016, @03:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the does-it-wear-a-cape? dept.

AMD emerged as a serious threat to Intel in servers more than a decade ago, but after a series of missteps and bad chips, the company's server business is hanging on by a thread.

Now, AMD is rebooting its server chip business with the upcoming Zen CPU, which will also be used in PCs. AMD is getting creative with Zen and considering merging the CPU with a high-performance GPU to create a mega-chip for high-performance tasks.

"It's fair to say we do believe we can combine a high-performance CPU with the high-performance GPU," AMD CEO Lisa Su said during an earnings call on Thursday.

Su's comment was in response to a question on whether AMD would ultimately combine its Zen CPU with a GPU based on the upcoming Vega architecture into one big chip for enterprise servers and supercomputing.

"Obviously, it'll come in time," Su said. "It's an area where combining the two technologies makes a lot of sense."

It wouldn't be the first time AMD has built a mega-chip. It has already combined full-featured CPUs and GPUs on made-to-order chips for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles. The 5-billion transistor Xbox One chip uses an eight-core AMD CPU code-named Jaguar and a Radeon graphics processor.

GPUs are being used as co-processors in some of the world's fastest computers for tasks like weather modeling, economic forecasting, and weapons design. They are also used by Google in data centers for deep learning tasks. Nvidia has cornered the supercomputing space while AMD has struggled with its FirePro high-performance GPUs.

But AMD's integrated mega-chip would be unique. Nvidia has high-performance GPUs but lacks a CPU. Intel's CPUs dominate servers, but it does not offer a GPU. Some supercomputers combine Nvidia GPUs with CPUs from Intel or AMD.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 25 2016, @02:08PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 25 2016, @02:08PM (#379809)

    The best way to help them succeed is to buy their stuff. Hope you are saving money for a Zen build later this year : )

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