AMD CTO: Competing Processor Cores to End

At a cloud computing technology show held in New York, USA, Donald Newell, chief technology officer of AMD's server business, told the media that he believes that the current competition between AMD and Intel on the number of processor cores will come to an end.

"The number of core battles will always come to an end. I cannot give an exact date, but I believe that by the end of this decade, we should not see 128-core full-size server processor chips." He had worked at Intel for 16 years and said that he joined AMD executives this summer.

"From a technical point of view, realizing super-core is not unrealistic. However, from a deployment point of view, people do not need such a high-power processor." And when the processor manufacturers abandon the development to ultra-multi-core At that time, it will undoubtedly bring a blow to software developers who have done everything possible to develop parallel computing technology in recent years.

Before the beginning of this century, the development of the CPU has been based on the frequency, and major manufacturers are competing to launch high-frequency processors. Donald Newell joked: "We thought we could make a 10GHz chip that year. But one day we discovered that such a CPU would be hot enough to melt through the earth, so we decided to give up."

Moore's Law continues to move forward, and manufacturers have begun to rely on the ever-changing lithography process technology to integrate more transistors on the processor and more cores. The dual-core processor has quickly been replaced by four cores. Now the battlefield between Intel and AMD has reached six cores and eight cores. But this war will eventually stop. "Like the battle of frequency, we will also end the battle for the number of cores."

In Newell's mind, the next competitive area will be heterogeneous computing. The processor will no longer be composed of multiple identical general-purpose computing cores, but will be developed to resemble the SoC system-on-a-chip. Different areas on the chip will perform different tasks such as encryption, video rendering, and networking. AMD's Fusion APU is the type that integrates the CPU core for general-purpose computing and the GPU core for graphics computing on the same die. On the Intel side, Sandy Bridge, which will be launched next year, has a concept of heterogeneous computing, although it has repeatedly demonstrated 80-core processors.

"The addition of special features to the processor core to achieve more efficient computing has become an irresistible trend. You will see more heterogeneous computing architectures emerging, and we will find those features that are often used if not yet designed. Dedicated instructions are added to the x86 instruction set, so a dedicated processing module is created in the processor."

The dedicated part of these chips will work just like the "coprocessor" of the year, "and our ongoing development is to design an architecture that will make this integration easier." Eventually, parts of the processor will become available. Configuration programming is like an FPGA programmable logic array. "This kind of thing has not yet existed on the road map, but from a technical point of view, you can see the trajectory leading to this form."