14 DAY TRIAL // Phil Hester, chief technology officer at AMD recently claimed at a conference that the merge between GPUs and Central Processing Units will eventually produce a new form of affordable supercomputer.
"Get ready for round two of the attack of the killer micros. By combining graphics processing unit (GPU) and CPU functions in heterogeneous cores, microprocessors will bring supercomputer performance to the desktop," said Phil Hester, in a short speech at (ICCAD) in San Jose, California.
AMD specialists believe that - in order to quickly scale the power of modern PCs - it is necessary to integrate GPUs into CPUs since the processing power of a powerful GPU is way higher than its desktop brother. Evidently, in such a case, heterogeneous combinations of CPUs will be produced with certain cores handling only data optimized for their architecture. How about that for a reason to buy Ati?
AMD says this evolutionary step will be quite a leap forward, equaled maybe by the release of X84-64 architecture. They also state the fact that they have 2 big problems when working with this type of technology: memory hierarchy and power consumption.