Next-gen Radeons to be Multi-core?
According to reports, AMD will move away from mega-GPU chips with their next release, codenamed R700.
Modern graphics processors rely on extensive amounts of parallelism to get calculations done as quickly as possible, but those GPUs are still monolithic chips designed with a given number of stream processors, texture units, render back-ends, and the like, each depending on their performance grade. However, the folks at Fudzilla say they have it on good authority that AMD will challenge that paradigm with its next-generation graphics processor, code-named R700. According to Fudzilla, low-end, mid-range, and high-end R700 cards will all have GPUs with varying numbers of identical R700 cores. To determine speed grades, AMD will simply outfit higher-end cards with more R700 cores.
Modern graphics processors rely on extensive amounts of parallelism to get calculations done as quickly as possible, but those GPUs are still monolithic chips designed with a given number of stream processors, texture units, render back-ends, and the like, each depending on their performance grade. However, the folks at Fudzilla say they have it on good authority that AMD will challenge that paradigm with its next-generation graphics processor, code-named R700. According to Fudzilla, low-end, mid-range, and high-end R700 cards will all have GPUs with varying numbers of identical R700 cores. To determine speed grades, AMD will simply outfit higher-end cards with more R700 cores.
Much as with CPUs, you couldn't simply continue to make them bigger and bigger, right? Therefore, this makes sense, and it was only a matter of time.
