Published in Graphics

Future of graphics is multi-chip, CTO claims

by on21 January 2008


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AMD's graphics CTO confirms


We've seen an old friend named Raja Koduri, the guy who is behind the super fast OpenGL driver for FireGL, and he has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer of AMD's graphics division.

We asked him a single question, as we wanted to know where he sees the future of graphics. He said that from this point on it appears that high-end graphics are going to go the multi-chip / multi-card path.

I can remember one of my conversations with Dave Orton, the previous CEO of ATI and that two years ago he confirmed that at some point GPUs would go dual core and beyond. This is what fthe future holds and CPU guys wouldn't do quad cores if they had some other choice. The market constantly expects more performance from a smaller and cooler chip and graphics chips are slowly hitting their limits. When CPUs couldn't get much faster frequencies they decided to make dual cores, and after that we got quad cores and eight core CPUs are in sight. This path will be the same for graphics chips.


It seems that the R680, dual RV670 card is just a first step that can clearly indicate what will happen in the future. If all goes well with this dual GPU on a single PCB we believe that ATI will continue this path and the R700 generation looks dual chip.

Nvidia, on the other hand, won’t be entirely dedicated for dual chip solutions; but it will continue to develop SLI, as two cards are faster than one.
 

Last modified on 22 January 2008
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