Tag: gpgpu

AMD unveils Radeon HD 8900M laptop graphics, ships them in MSI’s GX70 (eyes-on)

Did you think AMD showed all its mobile GPU cards when it launched the Radeon HD 8000M series in January? Think twice. The company has just unveiled the 8900M series, an adaptation of its Graphics Core Next architecture for desktop replacement-class gaming laptops. To call it a big jump would be an understatement: compared to the 8800M, the flagship 8970M chip doubles the stream processors to 1,280, hikes the clock speed from 725MHz to 850MHz and bumps the memory speed slightly to 1.2GHz. The net effect is about 12 to 54 percent faster game performance than NVIDIA’s current mobile speed champion, the GTX 680M , and up to four times the general computing prowess in OpenCL . The 8970M is more than up to the task of powering up to 4K in one screen, and it can handle up to six screens if there are enough ports. We’ll see how long AMD’s performance reign lasts, although we won’t have to wait to try the 8970M — MSI is launching the GPU inside the new GX70 laptop you see above. We got a brief, hands-off tease of the 17.3-inch GX60 successor at the 8900M’s unveiling, and it’s clear the graphics are the centerpiece. We saw it driving Crysis 3 very smoothly on one external display while powering 2D on two other screens, albeit through a bulky set of Mini DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA cables. Otherwise, the GX70 is superficially similar to its ancestor with that chunky profile, an unnamed Richland -based AMD A10 processor, Killer networking and a SteelSeries keyboard. More than anything, price should be the clincher: MSI is pricing the GX70 with the new Radeon at $1,100, which amounts to quite the bargain for anyone whose laptop has to double as a primary gaming PC. Gallery: AMD Radeon HD 8900M presentation Gallery: MSI GX70 eyes-on Filed under: Gaming , Laptops , AMD Comments Source: AMD , MSI

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AMD unveils Radeon HD 8900M laptop graphics, ships them in MSI’s GX70 (eyes-on)

AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri

AMD AMD wants to talk about HSA, Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), its vision for the future of system architectures. To that end, it held a press conference last week to discuss what it’s calling “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” (hUMA). The company outlined what it was doing, and why, both confirming and reaffirming the things it has been saying for the last couple of years. The central HSA concept is that systems will have multiple different kinds of processor, connected together and operating as peers. The two main kinds of processor are conventional: versatile CPUs and the more specialized GPUs. Modern GPUs have enormous parallel arithmetic power, especially floating point arithmetic, but are poorly-suited to single-threaded code with lots of branches. Modern CPUs are well-suited to single-threaded code with lots of branches, but less well suited massively parallel number crunching. Splitting workloads between a CPU and a GPU, using each for the workloads it’s good at, has driven the development of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) software and development. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri