AMD: 'Huge, monolithic' chips not our style
Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics chip unit doesn't want to build "huge" chips like rival Nvidia, an executive says.
But an Nvidia exec says smaller isn't always better or more efficient.
Such statements will help define how the two chip giants do battle at the high end of the graphics chip market in the coming years.
One of the largest graphics chips yet will be Nvidia's upcoming high-end GTX 280. This is the kind of chip that high-end gaming enthusiasts crave. But great performance often means a large transistor count. And the GTX 280 is expected to have both.
Here is an Asus board using AMD-ATI 3870 X2 that will be superseded by the new X2 board.
(Credit: Asus)AMD, of course, also intends to deliver extreme graphics technology with its upcoming X2, a follow-on to the current 3870 X2 series. And AMD wants to be clear: its strategy is fundamentally different than Nvidia's.
"We took two chips and put it on one board (X2). By doing that we have a smaller chip that is much more power efficient," said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing for the graphics products group at AMD.
"We believe this is a much stronger strategy than going for a huge, monolithic chip that is very expensive and eats a lot of power and really can only be used for a small portion of the market," he said. "Scaling that large chip down into the performance segment doesn't make sense--because of the power and because of the size."
Skynner said that AMD tries to design GPUs (graphics processing units) for the mainstream segment of the market, then ratchet up performance by adding GPUs rather than designing one large, very-high-performance chip.
Nvidia's "strategy is to design for the highest performance at all cost. And we believe designing for the sweet spot and then leveraging for the extreme enthusiast market with multiple GPUs is the preferred approach," Skynner said.
This applies to memory too. AMD thinks support for technologies like GDDR5 memory is another way to deliver good performance at a reasonable cost. "You don't need a huge chip with a huge data path to get the bandwidth. You can utilize a technology like GDDR5 to get that bandwidth," Skynner said.
Nvidia tends to favor very-fast, single-chip solutions.
Nvidia, of course, has a different take on why it chooses to develop big, fast chips.
"If you take two chips and put them together, you then have to add a bridge chip that allows the two chips to talk to each other...And you can't gang the memory together," said Ujesh Desai, general manager for GeForce products at Nvidia.
"So when you add it all up, you now have the power of two GPUs, the power of the bridge chip, and the power that all of that additional memory consumes. That's why it's too simplistic of an argument to say that two smaller chips is always more efficient."
Desai takes this argument a bit further. "They don't have the money to invest in high-end GPUs anymore. At the high end, there is no prize for second place. If you're going to invest a half-billion dollars--which is what it takes to develop a new enthusiast-level GPU--you have to know you're going to win. You either do it to win, or you don't invest the money."
(Note: Nvidia does offer GeForce 9800 GX2 technology but the GX2 uses a dual-board design--two 9800 chips, one on each board--rather than putting two chips on a single board as with AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X2.)
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
The AMD-Ati merger will pay off in the end, first for the Ati, then for the AMD side. AMD still does multi-core better than Intel, although that doesn't make the Phenon better. It won't be long before AMD puts out a quad-core GPU.
and about the cpu thing, it doesnt matter how good one processor is compared to another, it matters how much money you can make. but I think amd is in a dangerous spot these days. intel is pulling ahead fast in prosessor design and efficiency, for instance
-atom
-nehalem
amd was touting their phenom for a long time, but it turned out to be a bust in performance compared to intels much more developed quad core, even though is wasnt a "purebred" quad core.
the nehalem is going to really hurt amd unless they can either put out a better product or market the phenom differently.
nVidia makes WAY better video cards. ATI/AMD has been trying for the last couple of years to compete with the next-gen cards being released by nvidia and as soon as this highly acclaimed "nvidia buster" comes out, it is quickly realized that their approach is not working.
When they say more energy efficient I think of the hybrid car. 2 engines. Slow as crap.
People are not switching over to nVidia in droves because their cards suck and are more expensive. They are switching to nvidia because their cards work extremely well.
It sounds to me like you bought the ATI card to save a few bucks and you are now looking to justify that decision by making false statements.
Well sorry to tell you that but the 8800GT is the best quality/price ratio you can get at the moment... I don't think Nvidia doesn't know how to make good graphic card or good multi-core chips, each chip already have more then a hundred cores (I know it's a bit different but still...)... Don't get me wrong, I admire ATI/AMD as well, they were clearly the winner in the last generation, just don't say Nvidia don't know how to do their job...
"huge", "monolithic" chips will always be faster, because the chips dont have to communicate with each other over a relatively slow bus(compared to the chip). and, um, i_am_still_wade, if amd is better at their job, how come they have to use 3 times as many stream processors and still have a slower card?
In the end, not even the top people at AMD or Nvidea know how this will turn out.
In the end, not even the top people at AMD or Nvidea know how this will turn out.
but you better check your facts first
Intel Core 2 Duo series beat AMD's x2 series on performance/power consumption/ value except for the high end opterons but thats a different chip series you gotta compare opterons to zeons
perhaps you are thinking about the pentium D series which i would aggree x2 beats the pants off it.
though AMD did put 4 cores on 1 die faster phenom then intel a 4 cores on 2 die
http://techreport.com/articles.x/12091
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2203595,00.asp
What is the comparison of the energy lost due to capacitive load on the board traces compared to the energy lost by the transistors switching on a chip?
If the energy lost due to capacitive load on the board traces is much smaller, then your argument does not hold.
Just because AMD has another processor does not mean double the IO pins on the chip; this is an Intel Design. I agree there will be more power dissipated due to increased resistivity in the circuit, but how much power is dissipated has yet to be demonstrated.
?Desai was also being diplomatic, it is not only "simplistic" to say that two chips is better for performance, it is plain wrong.?
What is your measure of performance? Is it only power dissipation? Is it performance per Hz? Or is it a combination of these two factors and possibly more? I think Desai made a legitimate statement; ?it's too simplistic of an argument to say that two smaller chips is always more efficient." He never mentioned performance.
Your arguments seem biased.. what company did you say you work for again?
To cubicleslave1:
"So breaking a chip into two chips and communicating over the board is very costly in power consumption"
What is the comparison of the energy lost due to capacitive load on the board traces compared to the energy lost by the transistors switching on a chip?
If the energy lost due to capacitive load on the board traces is much smaller, then your argument does not hold.
Just because AMD has another processor does not mean double the IO pins on the chip; this is an Intel Design. I agree there will be more power dissipated due to increased resistivity in the circuit, but how much power is dissipated has yet to be demonstrated.
?Desai was also being diplomatic, it is not only "simplistic" to say that two chips is better for performance, it is plain wrong.?
What is your measure of performance? Is it only power dissipation? Is it performance per Hz? Or is it a combination of these two factors and possibly more? I think Desai made a legitimate statement; ?it's too simplistic of an argument to say that two smaller chips is always more efficient." He never mentioned performance.
Your arguments seem biased.. what company did you say you work for again?
So in summary, we are considering the merits of breaking a chip into two pieces, and replacing the on-chip wires that used to go between the two pieces with board traces. Again, there is no benefit to doing that in terms of power consumption and performance. The only benefit is that the dice become smaller and make it easier to get good yields, bringing down the manufacturing cost. Counter-acting this benefit, however, is the additional packaging cost and taking up more board real estate.
My measure of performance is either raw performance or performance per watt, and the two-chip solution is inferior on both counts. Less raw performance due to the limitations of driving a signal across the board, and more total power dissipation due to the additional board traces and IO circuitry.
Again, it is clear that AMD does not have the fab capacity to make their GPU's on their best fabs, so they're spinning the press with "not our style" hooey. I believe this is what Desai was probably thinking, but he made his statements a bit more charitable. I would guess that all of AMD's available cutting edge capacity is being taken up by Barcelonas and Opterons. Other than this paragraph (due to the "hooey" remark), I'd like you to point out where my comments are biased. Everything I've stated is pretty factual, I think.
- by aferozpu May 28, 2008 10:47 AM PDT
- In my last post I meant this is NOT an Intel Design.
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