Can the technologies will merge along with their companies?

What role does the GPU play in an emerging AMD platform? Now that AMD will be a producer of graphics chips, what will they do, and who will they do it for?

It isn't as though AMD had this burning desire to be building Radeon graphics cards - in fact, as we learned, that possibility may have been the furthest thing from AMD's mind, and might not have even entered the discussion. Foremost on AMD's mind was the need for an integrated platform, complete with CPU, chipset, and graphics. AMD's Hal Speed even warned us that this news might not come as exciting to the typical reader of Tom's Hardware Guide. But there are long-term concerns as well, particularly with regard to the emerging role of the GPU as more than just a graphics processor.

With a platform where the CPU and GPU work more cooperatively, conceivably, the CPU may be better able to take reiterative or scalable operations and pass them off to the GPU, even if they aren't graphics-related. "There's the whole concept of what's been referred to as GPGPU, what I think of generically as putting more tasks onto the GPU than just graphics," related AMD's Speed.

As ATI's Evenden said, GPUs today are more flexible than ever, fully programmable, and will soon meet the IEEE's basic requirements for general-purpose, 32-bit processing. "We've got both types of processors under one roof now," he stated, "and each of them will find their own applications. There'll be general-purpose computing that runs best on a multithreaded CPU, and there'll be other general-purpose computing that runs better on a massively parallel GPU-like architecture." In fact, ATI is preparing a demonstration of this discovery for just a few months from now.

Physics calculation is one example, mentioned Speed, of reiterative tasks that could conceivably be shuttled to the GPU, where it's computed in a parallel fashion. "It gives us the flexibility now to not really be constrained by the limitations of each of the architectures," he said, "and look more holistically across the entire platform and say, 'What is the best way to optimize this hardware for the applications that people want to run?'"

As ATI's Rick Bergman perceives it, co-opting the GPU for general purpose tasks is one of the new company's first priorities. "There's some areas that we both have strengths in," he told us, "[such as] GPGPU and physics. One of the challenges there, is having platform access to some of these things. Immediately, with a joint company, we address the platform question."

Here is where the two companies' messages, prior to their being sewn together, start to diverge. Bergman believes GPGPU could drive his platform strategy in two directions, perhaps simultaneously. "You could see like an 'ultra notebook' type of platform, where you could just integrate the functionality together, graphics with the CPU. There, you totally focus on power. Clearly, integration has its benefits there. And as you move up the food chain...with these high-power GPUs, can you do new tasks, or tasks that have historically been done on the central processor unit? The answer there is, yes. These are huge, parallel, massively computational engines that are capable of doing a lot of different types of algorithms that have historically been done by parallel CPUs."

Is there a place for the GPU in tomorrow's platforms?

Bergman also explained that the segmentation of the PC market is changing, and as a result, how we perceive it should change as well. Conceivably, reforming PC architecture around new and emerging platforms could enable vendors to segment their markets completely differently - not toward such common segments as "consumer desktop" and "business portable" today, but in a much more targeted fashion. This could be because neither the underlying architecture nor the overbearing form factor of the PC would dictate to vendors who their customers should be.

"To a certain degree, we won't actually care where the processing occurs, whether it's the GPU or the CPU," Bergman projected, "and that's really the strength. If you think about it, AMD will be the only company that'll be able to have that scalability all the way down to simple integration, up to many CPUs, many GPUs, to control both the hardware and the silicon, as well as the drivers and application sets on top of it. From that perspective, it could be very powerful."

Not caring what's doing the processing, might not be part of AMD's bigger picture. Hal Speed pointed out that the GPGPU development and the merging of CPU and GPU, are two separate development paths, the former of which presumes that both devices remain separate. Merging the two processors may make sense, he believes, but only to a limited extent, and for a limited customer base. "There are opportunities, certainly, in the growing countries like India, China, and Brazil, to have an integrated solution that's not legacy technology, but is current technology, but integrated in a cost-efficient manner that better meets and serves the needs of some of those markets and geographies."

So an "emerging markets" program, on the order of the $100 notebook PC that gets so much attention, might be the best outlet for a merged CPU/GPU from AMD's perspective. And even then, the graphics power we're talking about wouldn't be very impressive. "It doesn't make sense to me to take a high-end graphics card at 200 million transistors," Speed remarked, "and try to wedge that in with a CPU and a bunch of cache for today's mainstream and performance PC market."

The GPGPU project, added Speed, requires a different mindset, a different group of engineers...and a separate timeframe. Rethinking how to address computing tasks may yield a solution that's integrated into designs a few generations from now, he told us. He called this "the silicon effort." The immediate task, however, is for AMD to utilize the tools and IP the combined companies now already have, to build a reference platform that puts AMD back on the map with its ODM customers.

Today, ATI sees the merger with AMD as critical to finally being able to wrest control of the entire PC, to be able to shape all of it to suit its architectural goals, making compromises with no one. It sees this move as potentially elevating the role of the GPU to a position alongside the CPU in both priority and stature, such that the chip responsible for processing any given task may become inconsequential to most users. For AMD, the merger is an acquisition of a key element of intellectual property that a platform producer would need. It enables the co-opting of the GPU for purposes neither company might have been able to undertake, even acting jointly. But that's just a bonus, an extra payoff that may come after AMD integrates the GPU into its platform strategy.

Both are worthy goals. Both use the same terminology and the same tools. The question at hand is whether they may coexist. For this reason, the two companies may need to come to a closer agreement on long-term strategy before the ATI in AMD ends up like the AOL in Time Warner.

Related article:
AMD acquires ATI for $5.4 billion

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