AMD thinks there's no future for the multi-core race

[Evil-Dragon]

While Intel intends to cram 10s to 100s of cores in future CPUs, AMD believes the core race is a repeat of the MHz race. Instead, AMD is betting it all on Accelerated Processing Units, chips that mix and match CPU cores and specialized processors according to market demand.

See the full article here: http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/11438

(Story from Digg.com)

[Steve Lux]

AMD ought to look into phase-change (many - many times faster) RAM technology for their processor caches. That technology could get them a significant boost in the market with less energy usage and Ram that exceeds the speed capacity of the fastest processor.

I agree with AMD that for the desktop business there is little need or demand for a system with more than four cores - sorry guys, but crunching is a negligble part of the desktop market. For the vast majority of people once you handle the main application, communications, antivirus and video there is little need for more system capacity. Were there 10-times as many crunchers out there as there are now we might have some small influence on the system design market. But 800 thousand crunchers vs. 800 million desktop users means we are a not-so-significant part of the market.

The server market though is basically wide open to 32, 64 and higher core systems.

[Brucifer]

technology is just exploding and the market related forces can't keep up with it. By the time something makes it to market it is basically just about obsolete.

If you take some time to think about it, the AMD position isn't that haywire at all. Who owns gpu's now? AMD. Who has compilers, etc.? AMD. Where do you suppose the idea on more specialzed chips came from? GPU's? And has f@h had anything to do with that line of thinking? The cell? The only real issue for them (gpu's) is the power ussage and you can bet that issue is really being looked at hard. The cpu is rather general purpose and not up to the speed of other chips. I'm inclined to agree with the amd position. We're going through another evolutionary stage in the computing world.