Posted on Friday, June 17 2011 @ 23:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD Graphics CTO Eric Demers revealed some information about the company's next GPU architecture at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit, you can read it
over here.
For one, AMD's GPUs will break free from the shackles of fixed-function designs: the next AMD GPU architecture will apparently have full support for C, C++, and other high-level languages. Making that possible has involved some re-architecting of the main processing units inside the GPU, which will now be "scalar coprocessors" (similar to the vector supercomputers of the 1980s, Demers said). The new units will mix and match elements of multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD); multiple instruction, single data; and simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) designs. Gone will be the very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture of past AMD GPU architectures.
