CPU/Mobo AMD and ATI Promise Unified Development by 2008

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octave

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"Torrenza" platforms and unified GPU/CPU processors​

AMD announced the $5.4B USD takeover of ATI earlier today, but the new company is already making large plans for the future. Dave Orton, soon-to-be Executive Vice President of AMD's ATI Division, claimed that AMD and ATI would begin leveraging the sales of both companies by 2007. However, a slide from the AMD/ATI merger documentation has already shown some interesting development plans for 2008.

Specifically, it appears as though AMD and ATI are planning unified, scalable platforms using a mixture of AMD CPUs, ATI chipsets and ATI GPUs. This sort of multi-GPU, multi-CPU architecture is extremely reminiscent of AMD's Torrenza technology announced this past June, which allows low-latency communications between chipset, CPU and main memory. The premise for Torrenza is to open the channel for embedded chipset development from 3rd party companies. AMD said the technology is an open architecture, allowing what it called "accelerators" to be plugged into the system to perform special duties, similar to the way we have a dedicated GPU for graphics.

Furthermore, AMD President Dirk Meyer also confirmed that in addition to multi-processor platforms, that "as we look towards ever finer manufacturing geometries we see opportunity to integrate CPU and GPU onto the same [die]." However, Meyer also went on to clarify that this sort of technology might be limited to specific customers first. A clever DailyTech reader recently pointed out that AMD just recently filed its first graphics-oriented patent a few weeks ago. The patent, titled "CPU and graphics unit with shared cache" seems to indicate that these pet projects at AMD are a little more than just pipe dreams.

During the AMD/ATI merger conference call, ATI CEO David Orton furthermore added that not too long ago, floating point processing was done on a separate piece of silicon. Meyer and Orton both claimed that the trend for the FPU integration into the CPU may not be too different than the evolution of the GPU into the CPU.

Bob Rivet, AMD's Chief Financial Officer, claims the combined company will save nearly $75M USD in licensing and development overlap in 2007 alone, and another $125M in 2008. Clearly the combined development between the two companies has a few cogs in motion already.
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Image Courtesy Dailytech
 
^^ Lol...

Is it as simple as a BIOS Update? :P...

An nVidia-Intel merger/buyover sounds Sweet though.. .

But then the problem is... Conroe + XFire = Gone... :(.. :cry:.. Lol...

Wont happen until the end of this year atleast.

The ATi/Intel deal for Chipsets will not be resigned after the end of this year. :|. Hmmmph... No more XFire + Intel, after 2007 :(.
 
What about chipsets?ATi is still ages behind Nvidia on that front, and lets not forget that all of its southbridge technology is from ULi which is a part of the Nvidia empire now.
 
finally it happens!! right now, im just keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that ATI would be given enough freedom to keep coming up with better chips. too much of pressure would do no one any good...

Lets hope ATI helps AMD come out of the mess they are into right now...
 
undertaker said:
What about chipsets?ATi is still ages behind Nvidia on that front, and lets not forget that all of its southbridge technology is from ULi which is a part of the Nvidia empire now.
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Looks like u haven't heard of SB600. :P.

However this is big news... from next gen onwards, ATI doesn't need to depend on TSMC/UMC and hence the graphics chips could be significantly cheaper. They could be fabbed at AMD itself. As of now, seems like AMD is going for the price/performance market again after being drubbed by c2d. Having the best crossfire graphics performance in the next gen gpu wars might tilt the balance in AMD's favor though as it can optimize it as much as it wants to run the best on its on chips.
 
Aditya said:
An nVidia-Intel merger/buyover sounds Sweet though.. .
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I don't think there is much chance of that happening. Intel would not even want that... nVidia does not have any technology that Intel does not presently have...

Moreover, it might not be legally possible for Intel to buy out nVidia either... Because Intel is the largest maker of graphics components in the world and also a near monopoly in the CPU market too...

Chaos said:
However this is big news... from next gen onwards, ATI doesn't need to depend on TSMC/UMC and hence the graphics chips could be significantly cheaper. They could be fabbed at AMD itself.
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Not a great prospect for AMD, as they are finding it difficult to meet CPU supply demands as it is...
 
The new york fab is slated to be ready by like 2009 or 10. Thats not going to be from next generation. Moreover theyve stated that Ati will not fab at AMD fabs for now and continue at TSMC/UMC. Imo they wont bother making gpu's in their fabs for some time, first priotiy will be chipsets. But again i dont see that until mid 2007 at the earliest.

Heres an interesting patent filed by AMD a long time back. Very interesting

United States Patent 7,023,445

Sell April 4, 2006

CPU and graphics unit with shared cache

Abstract

A method and mechanism for managing graphics data. A graphics unit is coupled to share a cache and a memory with a processor. The graphics unit is configured to partition rendered images into a plurality of subset areas. During the rendering of an image, data corresponding to subset areas of an image which require a relatively high number of accesses is deemed cacheable for a subsequent rendering. During a subsequent image rendering, if the graphics unit is required to evict data from a local buffer, the evicted data is only stored in the shared cache if a prior rendering indicated that the corresponding data is cacheable.
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United States Patent: 7023445
 
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