AMD to adopt Simultaneous Multi-Threading, preps 200-300W TDP HPC APU

AMD talked about its long-term roadmap at the PC Cluster Consortium event in Osaka, Japan. It's kinda rare to hear tech companies publicly talking about five-year but it seems AMD’s Junji Hayashi didn't really reveal a lot of new information at this event. There are some interesting new tidbits here and there, but as you can see the slides are pretty vague.

The firm mentioned it's going to launch two brand new 64-bit CPU architectures this year; a traditional x86 AMD64 architecture codenamed Zen and the K12, which is based on the ARMv8 architecture. Both cores will be made on a 14nm FinFET process and WCCF Tech writes one of the new things officially confirmed during the conference is that both cores will support simultaneous multi-threading rather than the clustered multi-threading used by AMD's current Bulldozer family.

Intel's Hyper-Threading is one form of simultaneous multi-threading but it's possible that AMD implements it differently. The WCCF Tech report believes AMD's reference to "many threads" may imply that its cores will support many threads instead of just one additional thread as seen with Intel's Hyper-Threading.

Speaking about the GPU side of its APUs, AMD said it plans to update the GPU architecture inside its APUs once every two years rather than the faster update cycle seen with its discrete GPUs.

The roadmap also reveals AMD plans to introduce a High Performance Computing (HPC) APU in 2017, this will be quite a beast with a TDP of 200 to 300W! Such a design is now possible thanks to the much higher bandwidth offered by High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).