Re: I Should Surrender to Opteron

Iain McClatchie <iain-3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
David> Not that there isn't a market for this sort of thing [eDram],
but that market
David> is very very far away from the commodity market.

It's as far away as the nearest Xbox 360, which has a 10MB eDRAM die
stuck on the same package as the GPU. The eDRAM die takes care of
the frame buffer and various antialiasing operations done within it.
Apparently they manage to make good use of the very wide interface
to the on-die eDRAM.

Graphic folks that I've talked with say they keep looking at eDRAM, and
it's always on the edge of being a good idea. I've heard it gets a
fair bit of use in mobile graphics parts.

Right. I should've been more specific.

It sounded like John was trying to "surrender" to Opteron for some sort
of HPC work, so he's looking for general purpose CPU's with "good enough"
FP performance and "good enough" memory system.

I don't see eDRAM coming into the general purpose CPU side of things,
because 10's of MB was never going to be big enough for a modern OS and
some applications. So John won't get a chance to "surrender" to a general
purpose, commodity CPU with ten's or hundreds of MB of eDRAM any time
soon (IMHO). The graphics stuff, certainly. Now, if they start to allow
reconfigurablity to the point of being able to do DP FP on them, they
could become interesting for HPC sort of things.

OTOH, I am a fan of die stacking. Getting multiple GB of memory with
GB/s of bandwidth at near commodity prices sounds very good to me.


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davewang202(at)yahoo(dot)com
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