Items tagged with GCN
AMD has just announced a capability that’s already been baked into its GCN-based GPUs, that enables something called Asynchronous Shaders. Asynchronous Shaders are a feature of new or next-gen APIs like DirectX 12, Vulkan, and AMD’s own Mantle that allows certain tasks, which have previous been run synchronously and in a single stream on current GPUs, to run in parallel.As the name suggests, Asynchronous Shaders alludes to a GPU’s ability to execute shader instructions independently and out of sync. The technology leverages a trio of workload queues, to effectively handle multiple streams of work and more efficiently utilize available GPU resources with tasks that can be parallelized.As it stands...
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It was a mixed set of announcements from AMD last night, with some positive news for the chip manufacturer, but some long-term projections that sent investors skittering. This was Lisa Su's first quarterly announcement after taking over the CEO position barely a week ago, and she opened with good news -- not only did AMD turn a small profit on the quarter -- $17M net income ($63M operating income) on revenue of $1.43B -- it's secured two new semi-custom deals expected to provide roughly $1B in revenue over the next three years. That works out to around $84M per quarter -- not an enormous amount, no, but a nice feather in AMD's overall business cap. AMD expects to ship this hardware for revenue...
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Over the past nine months, we've seen the beginnings of a revolution in how video games are displayed. First, Nvidia demoed G-Sync, its proprietary technology for ensuring smooth frame delivery. Then AMD demoed its own free standard, dubbed FreeSync, that showed a similar technology. Now, VESA (Video Electronics Standard Association) has announced support for "Adaptive Sync," as an addition to DisplayPort. The new capability will debut with DisplayPort 1.2a -- we're going to walk you through what this means, and how it relates to both Nvidia's and AMD's plans for the market. G-Sync, FreeSync, and Adaptive Sync: How The Pieces Fit Together In order to understand how these technologies fit together...
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AMD’s socketed “Kabini” Athlon and Sempron APUs, designed for the new AM1 platform, have arrived in the form of the AMD Athlon 5150/5350 and the AMD Sempron 2650/3850. These chips are designed for the mainstream market and promise superb affordability and the kind of performance most users will be happy to have, with Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and Jaguar CPU cores. “With quad-core performance and AMD Radeon graphics the AM1 platform is an affordable solution that provides great flexibility due to an infrastructure built to deliver a multitude of options to our end users and system builders,” said AMD corporate VP and general manager, Client Business Unit,...
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Last week I was sent a rather bizarre picture of my likeness, doubled over as if I was being reflected in a mirror. The message read "wouldn't you agree that two is better than one?" This week, two cans of potato chips, a bottle of Hawaiian Volcanic water and specific details of a mission assignment were sent to me. All of this originating from AMD's PR firm of record. Hmm... PR firms are full of creative types. It's there job. Create a little mystery, generate a little buzz - I get it. In all my years at this gig, this has to be one of the more creative and dare I say cryptic efforts I've seen so far. But alas, we're a bit smarter than the average bear around...
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Earlier this month, Microsoft acknowledged that it would debut DirectX 12 at GDC this year, with promises that it would offer many of the same features as AMD's Mantle. Fast on the heels of that announcement came news that the API would also be deployed on the Xbox One, presumably as part of a future update. Now, a report from SemiAccurate claims that "Microsoft has adopted AMD’s Mantle but are now calling it DX12. The way they did it manages to pull stupidity from the jaws of defeat by breaking compatibility in the name of lock-in." Meanwhile, other reports across the 'Net are claiming that because the Xbox One has a real-time operating system, it won't benefit from the new API and that...
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Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that it's putting a full court press behind the DirectX 12 brand and concept. This is something of a reversal for Microsoft, which has previously been mum on its plans for the API. It responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it's been over four years since DX11 debuted. Since then, we've seen point updates released and attached to Windows 8... and that's...
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AMD is shaking up its mid-range graphics cards line-up today, by slashing the price of the Radeon R7 260X and introducing the more powerful Radeon R7 265. Though their model numbers are quite similar, the Radeon R7 265 is actually built around a beefier GPU than the 260X, and is more like the higher-end Radeon R9 270X. AMD is positioning the Radeon R7 265 against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. Stock on that GPU, however, has been drying up as of late, perhaps in anticipation of another new release aimed at the sub-$200 “sweet spot” of the graphics card market? We’ll know soon enough, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now let’s take a look at AMD’s...
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AMD is shaking up its mid-range graphics line-up today, by slashing the price of the Radeon R7 260X and introducing the more powerful Radeon R7 265. Though their model numbers are quite similar, the Radeon R7 265 is actually built around a beefier GPU than the 260X, and is more like the higher-end Radeon R9 270X. AMD is positioning the Radeon R7 265 against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. Stock on that GPU, however, has been drying up as of late, perhaps in anticipation of another new release aimed at the sub-$200 “sweet spot” of the graphics card market? We’ll know soon enough, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now let’s take a look at AMD’s...
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Today, AMD is officially announcing its Radeon R7 250X, a new $100 GPU that the company is positioning against NVIDIA's GTX 650 in the entry-level, discrete graphics market. Like all of AMD's other recent product launches, save for the R9 290 family, the new Radeon R7 250X is a rebranded HD 7000 part -- but it also comes along with a $15 price cut. For a card priced at roughly $100, that's not insignificant. The "new" R7 250X is essentially a rebranded Radeon 7770 GHz Edition, with the same 640 stream processors, 128-bit memory interface, 1-2GB of GDDR5 frame buffer, 1125MHz memory clock, and 1GHz core clock. It's still based on the 28nm Cape Verde GPU core and it has the similar...
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AMD's next-generation Radeon is set to debut later this fall and rumors about the upcoming chip have begun to leak out into the wild. While unconfirmed, the specs are in line with our expectations and what AMD has previously said about the chip. Hawaii won't be a fundamentally new architecture, but a refined approach to the technology already baked into Graphics Core Next (GCN). Specifically, the new chip is supposedly built to GCN 2.0 standards with support for DX 11.2 (this may already be present in current Radeon hardware), four raster engines (up from two), a maximum of 2,816 shader cores, a 900MHz clock speed, temperature-based Turbo modes rather than a current-based model, and a 430mm sq....
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The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are more similar than any two consoles from competing vendors have been in decades, but as far as hardware specs are concerned, Sony has a decided edge. While both systems use AMD CPUs and Radeon 7000-derived, GCN-based graphics cards, the Sony system has 1,152 shader cores compared to just 768 cores on the Xbox One. Both chips are (or were) reportedly clocked at 800MHz, leaving Sony with a 50% shader core advantage over its Xbox rival. It's far too late in the cycle for Microsoft to do much about its GPU design, so the company has decided to tackle the problem by increasing GPU clock speed. In a recent podcast, Major Nelson confirmed that the GPU is currently running...
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Bethesda Softworks is prepping a new title in the Wolfenstein series that pits the franchise's hero, B.J. Blazkowicz, against an alternate-history version of the post World War II era in which the Nazis, not the Allies, were ultimately victorious. BJ, apparently on ice for more than a decade, awakens in this nightmare version of the future -- a nightmare that the trailer refers to as a "rewriting", implying that BJ, at least, is aware of what's happened. Some losses... are unthinkable Wolfenstein always delved heavily into the Nazi fascination with the occult; the last games in the series relied upon it as a primary driver of their plot lines. Having killed Hitler in the third episode and dealt...
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One of the interesting facts to come out of Sony's PS4 announcement is that the new console is, for all intents and purposes, a PC. This isn't the first time a major manufacturer has launched a console based on commodity PC hardware -- Microsoft's original Xbox was a Pentium 3 with an onboard GeForce 2 GPU -- but it's a definite first for Sony. Both the PS2 and PS3 eschewed commodity hardware, opting instead for expensive technology Sony had a direct hand in developing. PS4's Killzone Shadowfall title Thus far, the PS4 has one capability that outstrips anything a traditional PC can offer -- memory bandwidth. The PC version of AMD's Jaguar is, according to AMD's own technical documents, a single-channel...
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AMD has announced a new FirePro graphics card at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis conference today (hereafter abbreviated as SC12). It's aimed at server workloads and data center deployments, but it's also the most powerful GPU Sunnyvale has ever deployed, bar none. Rumors of a dual-core Radeon 7990 have floated around since before the HD 7000 series actually debuted, but this is the first time we've seen such a card in the wild. Say hello to the S10000. How does this card fit into AMD's product roadmap? That's a bit complicated. Nvidia has explicitly prepped the K20/K20X for servers and workstations and spent years establishing itself...
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During today's AMD Fusion Developer Summit keynote, the company discussed its plans for next-generation servers, APUs, and future GPUs. Bulldozer may not have hit AMD's launch targets last fall, but the company is committed to evolving the Interlagos core as well as the associated platform. Much of the server-side discussion focused on the SeaMicro acquisition. AMD claims that SeaMicro has found a way to dramatically change the size of a full-power server, from the following standard form factor... Into something like this: Unsurprisingly, AMD claims that shrinking the entire server platform allows it to hit unheard-of core densities and offer enormous power efficiency improvements. We've talked...
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Inside sources have leaked information to the press claiming that the CPU in the next-generation PS4 (codenamed Orbis) is an AMD Llano A8-3850. The chip will supposedly be paired with an AMD Radeon 7670 GPU with 1GB of integrated VRAM. With all due respect to IGN, this is the sort of report that deserves a considerably better review than they apparently gave it. Sony may well be working with that level of AMD hardware, but that's not the same as shipping said configurations. Let's start with the APU. The A8-3850 was one of AMD's earliest Llano chips; a 100W 2.9GHz quad-core with an integrated Radeon 6550D. It didn't ship in high quantity -- AMD chose to emphasize shipping out mobile Llano's rather...
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