Saturday, May 11, 2013

Volcanic Islands to erupt at the end of year?

Update:
Sadly, this post is probably based on an old speculation posted in a forum and not on reliable information. For more info click here:
http://semiaccurate.com/2013/05/20/amds-volcanic-islands-architecture/

The time that follows seems to unveil fascinating GPU disclosures. AMD is rumored to unveil a new GPU architecture (named Volcanic Islands) in the Q4 2013 which according to the purportedly leaked diagram seen bellow, will contain a vast number of parallel compute elements (4096) plus 16 serial processors. Hopefully, these serial processors will alleviate serial code execution bottlenecks evident on the GPU. Thus, GPU compute could be further adopted for algorithms containing interleaved serial parts.

Volcanic Islands (Serial Processing Modules and Parallel Compute Modules)
Volcanic Islands block diagram


It is not known whether this information is correct but it highlights the trend of GPUs towards compute. Whatever the truth is I hope it will push AMD's rival to enforce the GPU computing capabilities of its desktop products that proved to be weak in it's last generation in favor of gaming and efficiency.