Convergence is the king processor processor event in the first half

The first month - the convergence trend appeared in the opening year of 2011, a convergence of products - on January 18 Intel released its second generation of smart Core processor products, which we have always been called Sandy Bridge. The great significance of Sandy Bridge lies in the integration of CPU and GPU - from Clarkdale to Sandy Bridge, the biggest change is that the CPU's Core and Display cores will be manufactured using 32-nanometer process technology, while the Core and Display cores will also be packaged In a Die, this is a fusion of previous Clarkdale.

About Core Graphics - Graphics solutions currently used in computer platforms are mainly "independent" and "integrated". The former has a separate graphics core and independent memory, which can meet the needs of complex and large graphics processing, and provide efficient Video encoding applications; integrated graphics will be the graphics core as a separate chip integrated on the motherboard, and the dynamic sharing of part of the system memory as a memory to use, can provide good graphics processing capabilities.

Significance and influence: Sandy Bridge is the first product with full CPU + GPU integration (previously Clarkdale still packaged the CPU and GPU separately). The AVX instruction set was added for the first time, and the video processing performance was effectively enhanced.

The third month - AMD brings convergence AMD brought in APU in March, but this is not the first two series of A series we reviewed, but mainly for the mobile platform E series, of course, APU is also a New concept product. The English name of the APU is "Accelerated Processing Units," which means to accelerate the processor. The concept of the APU was demonstrated by AMD in March. The E350 product released at the time was designed based on the concept of integration.

The main design idea of ​​the E350 is the mobile platform, but it also has a desktop-class product, but the APU and the motherboard of the desktop-class E350 are also directly packaged together. The entire package is very compact and consumes very low power.

In the field of the March conference, we saw the use of APU design notebook products, APU Thinkpad from Lenovo is very amazing, which also reflects the small and powerful APU product features, of course, this feature is still from the two words - Fusion.

Sixth Month - APU Mainstream Model Released As early as last year (2010) in February, Chekib Akrout, senior vice president of AMD's technical department, has already brought us APU news, describing Mr. Chekib Akrout's words as "the most The CPU and the best GPU make up the APU."

In the integration of CPU and GPU, AMD has a huge advantage. At present, AMD has the R&D strength of the two most important cores of the CPU and GPU. AMD has launched a series of obvious occupations in the period after its acquisition of ATI. The advantages of the set display products. There is no doubt that the APU will again be a masterpiece that surpasses all previous works. Its internal core will bring more acceleration performance than ever before.

The APU uses a new 32-nanometer process, which means that the APU will have lower power consumption and more tight integration. In fact, in our test, the Llano A series APU also showed very good performance strength, comparable to the display performance of the introductory display is indeed a great temptation.

Of course, the real significance of the APU lies in speeding up processing, which is what AMD officials call "heterogeneous computing." The English name for heterogeneous computing is Heterogeneous computing. It mainly refers to computing units that use different types of instruction sets and architectures. Compose the system's calculations. Common types of computing units include coprocessors such as CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, ASICs, and FPGAs. We often say parallel computing is an important part of heterogeneous computing.

The APU is called Accelerated Processor. The design concept is based on acceleration. The APU integrates the CPU core and the independent core. The acceleration is based on these two basic cores. Computationally, the complementary acceleration between the CPU and the GPU is also an important component. Heterogeneous computing is exactly what APU really means.

Significance and Influence: AMD's APU puts the concept of heterogeneous computing on the agenda. Currently, there are not many heterogeneous computing applications, but it is believed that the days of heterogeneous computing are not far away.

Fusion of contemplation and future prospects As mentioned on June 30th, AMD released the Llano APU. The APU is a product that combines CPU and GPU. The performance of this product is indeed powerful enough, and its CPU performance is comparable. At the same frequency, AthlonII has a lot to gain, and the performance of the display core is comparable to the entry of AMD. What's more important is that AMD has thrown out a new concept of “heterogeneous computing”, although the current display capability of APU is still high. Can not compare with the high-end alone, but more or less it also brings some attention to the impact of independence, let us focus on a set of data from the Internet.

From the Google Trends, we can see that the significant degree of attention has declined from the highest level at the beginning of the year, reaching two troughs in mid-January and the end of May, respectively, while in June it has risen somewhat, but at the end of June there has been a downward trend. Calculate the time, January is the time that Intel releases Sandy Bridge, and June is the time that APU is released.

The integration of CPU and GPU is undoubtedly influential to the independence, especially the entry level. However, according to our analysis, this influence will not shake the fundamentals of independence. The reason is personalization.

Desktop PC's DIY is particular about personalization, and the combination of CPU and graphics card itself is with personal preference factors in it, understand APU and core graphics people also know that the CPU and GPU with a fixed, such as Llano A3850 The CPU core with the HD6550D with 400 SP units, the pursuit of personalized users may not choose APU but continue to select the CPU + alone significant mode.

In the second half of the year, AMD will release bulldozers that have been on the market for a long time. As a trump card against competitors, the current performance of bulldozers is still very optimistic. Of course, Intel should also launch Sandy Bridge-based architecture in the second half of the year. Eight core products, so the main theme of the second half of 2011 will be converged and turned to a pure CPU product confrontation, whether it is bulldozer power stronger or the foundation of Sandy Bridge is harder, will be able to see the outcome in the second half.