StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Went to an AMD session this morning, and I figured the tech minded here might be interested in what they had to say:

When queried on the Core 2 Duo, all the rep said was to wait, and gave the strong impression that AMD have something up their sleeve that is on the way.

65nm and Quad Core processors will be here December/January.

ATI - They expect no change in relations with nVidia over the Ati buyout, the rep said that all they plan at this stage to do with Ati is to take over the manufacturing of their chips. I asked him about including graphics functions on the cpu, even if only basic integrated-on-motherboard equivilent, and he said there are no plans to do so.

FPGA (Fully Programmable Gate Array) - These should be included in the next gen of processors. For those who don't know they are cpu cores that are fully programmable by software, so a game may choose to make that core a physics specialist core and program it as such, or it could be for AI etc. AMD intend to initally have one of these per CPU, but intend to get up to one per 'proper' core, ie an Quad Core AthlonX2 would also have four of these cores.

atg wrote:FPGA (Fully Programmable Gate Array) - These should be included in the next gen of processors. For those who don't know they are cpu cores that are fully programmable by software, so a game may choose to make that core a physics specialist core and program it as such, or it could be for AI etc. AMD intend to initally have one of these per CPU, but intend to get up to one per 'proper' core, ie an Quad Core AthlonX2 would also have four of these cores.

Awsome

Eh. Color me unimpressed. All indications point to K8L being an FPU-eating beast but without major improvements in SIMD and integer performance. I'm not sure if adding in an FPGA is that good of an idea, either.