AMD Talks Next-Gen Fusion APUs

At the AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) the company shared its vision towards the future of computing in general as well as its own accelerated processing units (APUs) in particular. The company continues to believe in the maximum integration between general purpose processors and graphics processors in future.

“The first APUs from AMD dramatically increase processing performance while consuming less power and now we are building upon that achievement with our next generation of products. Future innovations are intended to make the different processor cores more transparent to programmers. They can then seamlessly tap into the gigaflops of power-efficient performance available on the APU and design even faster, more visually stunning applications on a wide range of form factors," said Phil Rogers, a corporate fellow at AMD.

Based on the integration of CPU and GPU processing cores on the same chip, AMD is focused on evolving the architecture to make it appear as a unified processing element to the software programmer. That includes a number of evolutionary steps expected to continue through 2014 such as:

• Support for C++ features that more fully leverage the GPU as a parallel processor
• User-mode scheduling for lower latency task dispatch between CPUs and GPUs
• Unified memory address space and fully coherent memory shared by the CPU and GPU so they operate seamlessly together

AMD also announced plans to publish a detailed specification on the features and functionality required to meet the requirements of the architecture.

source:www.xbitlabs.com