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The CPU Redefined: AMD Torrenze and Intel CSI
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Mar 05, 2007 07:58 AM
from the i-believe-the-children-are-our-future dept.
from the i-believe-the-children-are-our-future dept.
janp writes "In the near future the Central Processing Unit (CPU) will not be as central anymore. AMD has announced the Torrenza platform that revives the concept of co-processors. Intel is also taking steps in this direction with the announcement of the CSI. With these technologies in the future we can put special chips (GPU's, APU's, etc. etc.) directly on the motherboard in a special socket. Hardware.Info has published a clear introduction to AMD Torrenza and Intel CSI and sneak peaks into the future of processors."
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huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thereby decreasing their cost effectiveness. 'Tis a viscious circle.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Example: in my workplace, we have nice-ass Dells which do almost nothing and store all their data on a massive SAN. They're 2.6GHz beasts with a gig of ram, a 160G HD, and a SWEET ATI vid card each. Now, while I personally make use of it all proper-like, most people here could get along with a 1GHZ/512MRAM/16GHD/Onboard video system.
I think Intel/AMD stands to make a lot of money if they were to build an all-in-one-chip computer, ie: CPU, RAM, Video, Sound, Network, and a generous flash drive on a single chip.
Parent
Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't tried to run Vista yet
Parent
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing about this whole co-processor approach is that the same interface used to connect multiple CPUs to each other is being opened up for other processing devices. This makes it possible to mix and match cores as desired. For example, you could build a mesh of multi-core CPUs in a more "normal" configuration, or you could mate each CPU with a DSP-like number cruncher and make a special purpose "supercomputer". It will interesting to see what types of compute beasts will emerge from this.
Parent
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The limits aren't such a big deal.
Quad-core processors are already rolling off the lines and user demand for them doesn't really exist.
They could easily throw together a 2xCPU/1xGPU/1xDSP configuration at similar complexity.
And the market would actually care about that chip.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Now, if there are other CPU's out there doing native quad core for general purpose computing, I'm unaware and withdraw my ignorance if so
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
One cool thing I discovered while I was learning to program was that you could make one of the coprocessors interrupt when the electon beam of the monitor was at a certain position. Pretty nifty.
BTW, for those who are too young/old to remember, those were the days of dos, and friends of mine were bragging with their 16 color EGA cards. Amiga had 4096 colors at the time.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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EGA displays could use 16 out of 64 if I'm not mistaken.
Ahh those were the days
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Amiga had 4096 colors at the time.
Better put "4096" with a "*" qualifier. You couldn't assign each pixel an exact color - the scheme got you more colors by being able to set a bit that said that the next pixel modifies the previous pixel by "x". In this way, they could get more colors using less memory than traditional X bits per color per pixel schemes (Amiga was a bitplane architecture.)
Anyway, back on topic, I wish that the CPU manufacturers could finally come up with a "generational" standard socket. A well-designed module socket should last as long as an expansion slot standard (ISA,PCI,PCIe) and not change for damn near every model of chip. I should be able to go out and get a one, 2, 4, 8 socket motherboard, and stick any CPU / GPU / DSP module into it I want. Can we please finally shitcan the 1980's motherboard designs?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Folks with 16-bit PCs were bragging about their 16 out of 64 color EGA cards and single-tasking OSs when even the simplest the Amigas had 32-bit processors, 32 out of 4096 colors, PCM audio and a fully multi-tasking OS coupled with a GUI.
As for the "processor socket", there are people selling computers that go into passive backplanes. If you put the CPU and memory in a card, there is little reason why you would have to upgrade the rest of the computer when you change the CPU (you w
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Early high-end computer systems started out like this, utilizing backplanes like VME. They've been phased-out, because ultimately that modularity was too expensive, and because the shared-bus architecture hurt performance. Hardware devices that used to require multiple cards can now fit on a single chip, and have their own PCIe drop to increase performance. Memory upgrades that used to require multiple cards just to reach 1MB are now eclipsed by 8 and 16-chip configurations on a single DIMM (a specialized expansion slot), and have their own bus to improve performance.
Let's say they went with the Single-board computer design (CPU+memory+bus controller) - now your costs go up, because you have to build multiple "processor cards" for all the different backplanes you want to plug into. ISA backplane - 1 model. PCI backplane - 1 model. PCI + ISA backplane - 1 more model, and it also requires a new specification: the new bus designs have to play nice with the limited I/O space at the back of the card, so you end up either making the bus connector larger, or you end up making certain bus combinations impossible.
With the motherboard and atached bus design, your costs go down because you can provide a mixture of the busses that are the most popular. Thus, you only have one product to design and electrically verify, and only one manufacturing line to test.
Also, when you move to point-to-point architectures like PCI-Express, with a separate backplane you really limit yourself to the slot configurations you can offer. Unlike with a shared bus, with P2P interconnects you have to make sure the backplane layout matches the connector layout exactly. This means you either standardize on ONE configuration (boring), or you put the ports on the processor card (what we are doing).
The only places that still use modular bus designs today are embedded developers, and that's because they still need the expandability and modularity that end-users do not. They also need the backward-compatibility affored by these old bus specifications (VME especially). They pay for it, in terms of performance - most of them bypass the slow backplane of VME or CompactPCI with faster interconnects like Gig/10GigE, Fibre Channel, RapidIO or Infiniband.
Parent
Amiga love.......memories......... (Score:3, Funny)
An Amiga 1000, Deluxe Paint, Flight Simulator, Amiga Basic and 2Meg of Ram = $3500.
Later got the Sidecar for DOS, and Earl Weaver Baseball. Ahhhhhhhh.
20 years later, and no hardware or software has given me such joy.
NVidia, Matrox, ATI, AMD, Intel, WTF?
The Amiga showed you how 20 years ago, and you are just now getting around to it?
Bring back multi-resolution windows, bitches!
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what he's describing, but I don't believe for a second that's what it's going to be...
I don't believe for a second practically ANYONE is going to buy an expensive, multi-socket motherboard, just so they can have higher-speed access to their soundcard... Ditto for a "physics" unit.
This exists solely because CPUs are terrible at the same kinds of calculations ASICs/FPGAs are incredible at. That will be the only killer app here.
Video cards are a good example on their own. CPUs are so bad, and GPUs are so good, that transferring huge amounts of raw data over a slow bus (AGP/PCIe) still puts you far ahead of trying to get the CPU to process it directly. And it works so well, the video card companies are making it easier to write programs to run on the GPU.
And GPUs aren't remotely the only case of this. MPEG capture/compression cards, Crypto cards, etc. have been popular for a very long time, because ASICs are extremely fast with those operations, which are extremely slow on CPUs.
The situation is much more like x87 math co-processors of years past, than it is like the Amiga, with independent processors for everything.
It is likely that, in time, integrating a popular subset of ASIC functions into the CPU will become practical, and then our high-end video cards will be simple $10 boards, just grabbing the already-processed data sent by the chip, and outputting it to whatever display.
Then maybe AMD and Intel will finally focus on the problem of interrupts...
Parent
Definitely. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a damn shame that Commodore couldn't market/sell their way out of a wet paper bag.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
The same applies to trying to integrate GPUs into the CPU, at the moment a top-end GPU is too large and expensive to integrate, and not everyone needs one. The move to having a GPU in a CPU socket should cut a lot of cost because the GPU manufacturers won't have to create an add-in-card to go with the GPU, they can just design the chip to plug straight into a standardised socket.
At the same time low-end GPUs are small and cheap enough that they are being integrated into motherboards, integrating a basic GPU into the CPU seems like a good next move, and the major cpu manufacturers seem to agree. IIRC Via's smallest boards integrate a basic cpu, northbridge and gpu into one chip? AMD are definitely planning it with their aptly named "Fusion". *Checks wikipedia* Yeah, Via's is called "CoreFusion".
Still, you are right, all-in-one cpus are the future, we're just not quite there yet.
Parent
Re: huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, no thank you. I've had enough problems ever since they started to integrate more and more peripherals on the motherboard. I'd be troubled if I'd have to choose between either a VMX-less, DDR3-capable chip with the GPU I wanted, a VMX- and DDR3-capable chip with a bad GPU, a VMX-capable but DDR2 chip with a good GPU, or a chip that has all three but an IO-APIC that isn't supported by Linux, or a chip that I could actually use but costs $500.
Instead of gaining those last 10% of performance, I'd prefer a modular architecture, thank you. Whatever is so terribly wrong with PCI-Express anyway?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The Intel 8086 had the Intel 8087 [wikipedia.org]
A whole collection of Intel FPU's is at Intel FPU's [cpu-collection.de]
TI's TMS34020 (a programmable 2D rasterisation chip), had the TMS34082 coprocessor (capable of vector/matrix operations)
(Some pictures here [amiga-hardware.com]. Up to four coprocessors could be used.
Now, both of these form the basis of a current day CPU and GPU (vertex/geometry/pixel shader units).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Great, so now instead of spending a couple of hundred to upgrade just my CPU or just my GPU, I'll need to spend four, five, six hundred to upgrade both at once, along with a "S[ound]PU", physics chip, etc?
Never happen. Corporations aren't going to want to have to spend hundreds of pounds more on machines with built-in high-end stuff they don't want or need. At home, I want loads of RAM, processing power and a strong GPU. At work, I absolutely d
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Actually there was an evolution of processor design into single, monolithic processing units; until well into the '70s it was hardly uncommon that computers would have all sorts of processing units (remember the "CPU" is the "Central Processing Unit.") Of course in this case I'm primarily talking about mainframes; one of the distinctions of the minicomputer (and later microcomputer) was that "everything was together" in the CPU. But even then the systems didn't really
CSI? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:CSI? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, clearly, they won't. They're decentralised.
New on NBC, "CSI: Wherever". We even have a song by The Who for the opening credits - "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere".
Parent
AMD competes with... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Previous announcements (Score:4, Informative)
IBM and Intel Corporation, with support from dozens of other companies, have developed a proposal to enhance PCI Express* technology to address the performance requirements of new usage models, such as visualization and extensible markup language (XML).
The proposal, codenamed "Geneseo," outlines enhancements that will enable faster connectivity between the processor -- the computer's brain -- and application accelerators, and improve the range of design options for hardware developers.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2
Re:Previous announcements (Score:5, Funny)
Since it became bloatware that is capable of wasting 90% of the processing power of a modern computer.
</sarcasm>
Parent
Retro-innovation (Score:5, Informative)
Amiga had all processors on the main board (Score:2)
It had custom designed processors for sound and video on the motherboard.
And then it was sold together with a fitting OS, so you got computer and software as a complete functioning machine in stead of many loose ends in a PC.
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Seriously, I did, and it's feeling just like the old days.
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I moved from Amiga 1200 to iMac in 1999. Never had a PC in the house (except, perhaps, the bridgeboard on the A2000, which, back then, made me wonder what all the fuss of PCs was about).
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All this is really doing is bringing a more standardised set of co-processers on to the mobo rather than any number of 3rd party ones - it would make it much easier keeping the OS stable if you have a more controlled number of architectures to deal with.
On the downside, if these processors were DRM hobbled, it would make life harder too..
Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
So the options are to have more slots, or make something I like to call an 'interface card'. See, there'll be these slots on the motherboard that cards fit into... wait, don't we have this already?
And more slots isn't really an option because the computer would end up being massive with all the cooling fans and memory slots. (Which are apparently seperate for each PU.)
I kind of hope I get proven wrong on this one, but I don't think this is such a great idea. Just very interesting. Having 16 slots and being able to say you want 4 AIPUs, an APU, 4 GPUs, 3 PPUs, and 4 CPUs on my gaming rig and 1 GPU, 1 APU, and 14 CPUs on my work rig would be awesome.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps the better thing to do would be better slot designs (not that we need more with all the PCI flavors floating around right now) with integrated, defined cooling channels. If you were to make the card spec with a box design rather than a flat card, you could have a non-connector end mate with a cooling trunk and use a squirrel cage (higher volume, quieter, more efficient)fan to ventilate the cards.
Parent
Amiga? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The diehard Amiga fans were thinking, "This would really work well if the bus ran faster than any of the cores."
Slashdot could benefit from a co-processor... (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot's computers might benefit from a co-processor, the function of which is to monitor and correct spelling and grammar errors. It would serve like an editor's job, only better, because, you know, it might actually work.
(Bye-bye karma!)
Amiga v2? (Score:2)
EOISNA (Score:3, Insightful)
As rumored, first addopted by the porn industry (Score:3, Funny)
Re:As rumored, first addopted by the porn industry (Score:4, Funny)
AI? For porn? You have seen porn before, right?
Parent
Cell Clusters (Score:4, Interesting)
These little bastards are inherently distributed computing: a microLAN of parallel processors, linkable in a microInternet.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! No, really: a Beowulf cluster of Cells [google.com].
You can buy Torrenza today (Score:3, Interesting)
Really just two types of processors (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's nice to see you've finally caught up with all the people that have made an Amiga comment.