AMD Preps For Server Graphics Push 41
Nerval's Lobster writes "AMD named John Gustafson as senior fellow and chief product architect of AMD's Graphics Business Unit, the former ATI graphics business unit. Gustafson, known for developing a key axiom governing parallel processing, will apply that knowledge to AMD's more traditional graphics units and GPGPUs, co-processors that have begun appearing in high-performance computing (HPC) systems to add more computational oomph via parallel processing. At the Hot Chips conference, AMD's chief technical officer, Mark Papermaster, also provided a more comprehensive look at AMD's future in the data center, claiming that APUs were the keystone of the 'surround computing era,' where a wealth of data — through sensors, gestures, voice, augmented reality, metadata, and HD video and graphics — will need to be contextualized, analyzed, and either encrypted or assigned privacy policies. That, of course, means the cloud must shoulder the computational burden."
A Wealth of Data, Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:So it has nothing to do with graphics then... (Score:5, Informative)
Except a modern GPU is basically a coprocessor that, 99% of the time, is used to run a library that primarily does graphics. Rendering, shading, transformation, those are now all done "in software". The only things still done "in hardware" are texture lookups and video output (turning an int[4][1080][1920] into a DVI or HDMI or VGA or whatever signal.
They're also a pretty high-volume market, so you get them much cheaper than you would a custom-built coprocessor or even FPGA, and they're *probably* better-designed than the one you would make, as they have entire teams of professionals working on them.
Also, both nVidia and AMD already make "compute-only" cards - nVidia under the brand "Tesla", AMD under the brand "FireStream".
Re:That oughta work (Score:3, Informative)
Having watched half an hour of the Republican Convention last night, I'll have to agree.