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When KitGuru first spoke with AMD's Developer Relations guru Nic Thibieroz, back in May 2011, he had just taken over as point-man for the chip designer's drive into the hearts and minds of the developer community. Things have changed a lot over the past 32 months. We got the chance to pull Nic into a dark corner at AMD's recent Tech Day. This is what he revealed.
“What AMD is doing with the APU is really amazing”, said Nick. “It's like a human brain where the functionality of the left and right hemisphere is similar, but very different. What we have done is to break down the barriers between the sides to create something unique that has revolutionised the market”.
The revolution that Nic is referring too, began in 2006 when AMD bought ATi and immediately announced that it would be creation a Fusion between the product groups. That union was not as smooth as many would have wished for, but on January 29th 2011, KitGuru brought you the world's first review of the new platform.
In the 3 years that followed, AMD has pushed forward with updates and amendments, while at the same time looking over its shoulder as Intel picks up its lumbering mass of hardware engineers and begins chasing a leadership position for graphics.
During a recent conference in London, one of Intel's top graphics experts revealed that his organisation can now tick virtually all the boxes when it comes to ‘So what can your graphics engine do?'. The button that has been missing is ‘performance leader' and, from what Nick told us about Kaveri, Intel won't be taking the lead any time soon.
Intel can start HSA using their own gpu chips which are poor but still something. They can surely create a much better memory controller and implement a scaled down eDRAM writeback cache to speed up DDR3 accesses much like the Xbox 1 did. In fact, Iris PRO already has it implemented but with 128MB which is too big and eats 20watts of power constantly. Using 32MB eDRAM is enough to make a serious bite to HSA performance they will aim at.