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
(Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Sunday July 24 2016, @04:12PM
I'd like to see a meaty 20Tflop chip, but a blend of CPU/GPU. Maybe many parallel units using hypertransport and not PCI.
I did some digging on an APU unit I had so see if it would be useful for calculations, and found the GPU (Radeon) was sitting on a PCI bus inside the APU!!! So, some thought needed here....
Intercompent latency is a real problem, because as computational density rises, we still have a need to have partial results *faster* and not have to amortise the enormous overhead of filling the bandwidth pipes.
My $0.02....
(Score: 4, Insightful) by seeprime on Sunday July 24 2016, @05:01PM
After ten years of disappointing APU's, and FX CPU's with excessive power draw (over 200-watts), it's time for AMD to just release a great product. Many of us just don't believe them anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @05:52PM
That reminds me, how to they intend to compete on power efficiency? Its really important in the market, and they seem to be behind intel and nvidia on that front.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday July 24 2016, @06:19PM
Looking at the rumor mill, the 16-core Zen Opteron ("Snowy Owl") could have a less than 100 Watt TDP. This should also be one of the parts with graphics.
There also could be 4, 8, 12, 24, and 32 core variants [fudzilla.com]. I'm not sure which ones will have graphics.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @06:05PM
Used signed management engine code, just like Intel's ME, and both is known to have issues and provides ring -2/-3 level access to the the memory controller, ethernet devices, etc while not being auditable from the x86 side, I am not sure even a good performance chip would get me to buy AMD anymore.
They had a chance to differentiate themselves from Intel by being an open platform, but instead they chose to emulate every bad thing intel has done for the past 8+ years, including reneging on their support of coreboot with limited/no blogs. Anything post AM3 is suspect. (Some FM2 CPUs are apparently acceptable, but anything FAM15h+ is not.)
As a result AMD is getting no new business from me, same as Intel. A limited subset of ARM hardware is holding me over in the meantime, only due to having given up gaming thanks to Online DRM, Steam and 'Glorified PC' Consoles.
Hopefully the Talos workstation, or a RISC-V/J2+ 'reference' board will come out within the next year to provide us with an alternative and full open motherboard architecture to replace Wintel/AMD/ARM for those of us concerned with our freedom and our personal information security.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @06:07PM
used/use is/are and blogs/blobs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @10:42PM
See now if you had a cpu that looked after you, grammatical errors would be a bad memory only.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @06:35PM
It's also annoying that they disable the CPU video processing unit on their processors if you have a separate graphics card unless that graphics card is a Radeon. Only then can you use both. Otherwise the video processing unit on the CPU locks down and becomes unusable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @12:28AM
That bullshit is all thanks to sucking microsoft cock along with whoring themselves to the *AA johns. And Fuck intel and its garbage designs: ACPI, IME, EFI, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @05:04PM
AMD had "APUs" for buncha years now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2016, @10:37AM
Ya but this one's a super-chip.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday July 24 2016, @07:30PM
So what spyware and backdoors are built into this CPU?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26 2016, @04:25PM
All of them.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday July 24 2016, @07:37PM
AMD had a real chance at taking the server market by storm but they completely blew it multiple times by constantly delaying their 64-bit ARM server chips. whoever forced those chips onto the back burner really shot the company in the foot. now they are sending mixed signals and continuing to push their x86 for servers.
(Score: 2) by steveha on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:54AM
I completely disagree with this analysis.
Intel was trying to turn x86 into a dead end, and were only planning to release the "Itanic" (the Itanium) for 64-bit computing. This was because Intel wanted to be the sole source for 64-bit chips; since AMD was able to make x86, Intel was trying to get rid of x86. But AMD extended x86 to 64 bits, which was exactly what the market really wanted; it helped AMD that the Itanic was such a disaster.
Then Intel made things worse for themselves with the Pentium 4 family, a line of chips designed for clock rate above all else. These chips got less done per clock cycle, but Intel said that wouldn't matter because they were going to clock them up to 10 GHz or something like that. But it didn't work out. The Pentium 4 chips were just horrible.
During this time, AMD sold plenty of Opterons for high-end compute needs. During this time, AMD deserved to kick Intel to the curb. Itanic was a disaster, Pentium 4 was lousy, and AMD had chips with a better design. But Intel is huge and has lots of money and used contracts to get large vendors like Dell to keep buying Intel chips and not buy any AMD chips. This was purely anti-competitive, and would have been ruinous to do indefinitely, but it kept AMD from making a bunch of money to pay back their R&D costs and bought Intel time to catch up.
If I recall correctly, what happened next was that a small R&D division owned by Intel (in Israel I think) was playing around with the Pentium III design, doing a die shrink to make a low-power mobile part. This got more work done per clock cycle (by far!) than a Pentium 4 and scaled well. Intel grabbed it with both hands and it became the Core 2 line of chips. Sometimes it pays off to be as big as Intel is and have a bunch of divisions.
Then Intel corrected all the deficiencies in their chip designs, and pulled way ahead of AMD on process technology. With Intel being two generations ahead, AMD was hard-pressed to compete. That's why AMD is currently selling ridiculously high-Wattage CPU chips; they're trying to compete by selling 28 nanometer chips while Intel is down to 14 nanometer process.
But the company that fabs chips for AMD is ready to go to 14 nanometer now. They skipped one generation completely and now will be caught up to Intel. Intel will presently go to 10 nanometer, but for at least a moment AMD will be caught up. And 14 nm vs. 10 nm has got to be an easier battle than 28 nm vs 14 nm!
Also, the reports I'm reading say that AMD has improved their design and the new Zen chips should have 40% more work done per clock. So, caught up on process technology, design improved... AMD should be competitive again, and I fully expect AMD to win on price/performance.
I have a few HP N54L Microservers [wikia.com] with AMD Turion II chips in them. I would purely love an updated model, just like what I have but with a Zen chip.
(Score: 2) by dublet on Monday July 25 2016, @10:39AM
As a loyal customer of AMD I hope they succeed. The CPU market needs some serious competition and Intel is just too tainted a brand for me [wikipedia.org].
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 25 2016, @02:08PM
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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