Which device capabilities does Llano support? And specifically, is fp64 supported on the GPU? I am assuming not, but a confirmation will be nice.
fusion is only for notebook, its GPU core must be low, I think it will not support good opencl cability.
Mike, fusion is not only for notebook. Sabine is for notebooks, Lynx platform is for desktops. Anyhow, it will most likely not feature DP. I once discussed this in a thread (with Micah if I'm not mistaken) and from rough speculations we concluded that adding DP capability porportionally increases the cost of smaller chips more than the larger ones. (I did not quite understand the argument)
Anyhow, feel free to add +1 to pseudo-DP in the Suggest feature you want in AMD APP, and then there will be DP support on it. 😉
Roughly speaking (maybe very, very roughly), Llano is a Athlon/Phenon II up to x4 + Radeon up to HD6550 put together, so chances to have DP units in GPU are really small, not to say zero. But, since they are not for sell yet, don't expect to have AMD people commenting on this.
Llano has been officially released yesterday, so I take it not much secret remains about them. All details have been specified and notebook manufacturers already announced their exact products based on Llano.
It is definately not Athlon. 1MB of L2 / core is even more than on Phenom II processors (512kB). Husky should outperform Phenom II by about 6% in terms of computation and has twice as much cache. That is quite far from an Athlon II.
LLano APU does not have a DP supported GPU. More information will be released shortly.
May I ask why is it that AMD has mobile CPUs that are always one generation behind desktop variants? Llano is based on Phenom II (whatever the name was of the chip inside). Second generation APUs (showed off at Fusion Developer Summit just now) already has a working APU based on Bulldozer.
Since Bulldozer was supposed to launch alongside with Llano (meaning the chip design was ready), why not have both of them with the same technology? Intel Core-ix always uses same technology for desktop and mobile variants, and notebook processors are damned strong compared to AMD. I know APUs have the emphasis on the IGP, but why not use same architecture for the CPU part?
Also, IGP is one generation behind. Same will go for Trinity, which uses Bulldozer CPU (which will be 6 months old technology) and Cayman SIMD design IGP, which yet again will differ from HD7xxx series (most likely). The reason why I ask is, because Hybrid-CrossFire and the likes cannot be utilized with the same generation discrete GPUs, because they are always using a different architecture. Why not utilize all new designs at roughly the same time, so that products can co-operate better?
So if I take it correctly, GPUs can be released faster due to the reason that they must only comply with AMD shader compiler. In the case of CPU, it takes a lot more testing, thus when the chip is designed, by the time the testing is finished, the IGP falls one generation behind descrete variants.
In theory, isn't it possible to test the two seperately? It is not just software engineering that utilizes interface approach to modular development. Apart from a memory interface and perhaps a cache coherency protocol (if it is shared) the CPU and the GPU are still pretty much seperate inside an APU. Is it not possible to put them together if the interface is well defined?
So you say that the reason Intel IGPs are far inferior to AMD's is because they never create descrete variants, just integrated ones that fall behind the rivals due to the amount of testing? This statement however still does not answer why the desktop and mobile variants of CPUs have to differ on AMD side.
Two questions were: the IGP/discrete generation gap, and desktop/mobile VPU generation gap. If Llano and Bulldozer were to be released at the same time, why couldn't both utilize Bulldozer architecture? Since Trinity already has a working prototype, it seems to me that it really wouldn't have been so impossible to skip Llano. Or am I jumping to conclusions?
Having heard rumors about release dates of Trinity and Souther Island (7xxx) discrete cards, I would rather wait for that combination.