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AMD Exascale Heterogenous Processor sports 32 Zen cores

by Mark Tyson on 3 August 2015, 12:06

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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AMD has released information concerning an upcoming 'Exascale Heterogeneous Processor', or EHP. In a paper submitted to the IEEE AMD details an APU which packs a multitude of Zen cores, Greenland graphics and up to 32GB of HBM2 memory. It says this processor is an embodiment of its "vision for exascale computing". According to the source that first published the news of this paper, this new HPC/Workstation APU from AMD will be launched between 2016 and 2017.

The AMD Exascale Heterogenous Processor (EHP) sounds like a monstrously powerful APU. According to the paper, and as you can see from the diagram above, the EHP will pack 32 CPU cores. The cores are likely to be based upon the 'Zen' microarchitecture, being developed with Jim Keller at the helm. The graphics portion of the EHP is expected to be made from next generation Greenland graphics cores, however there is no detail about graphics core count.

With HBM2 employed in stacks of 4GB it is thought that the EHP can have a maximum of 32GB of RAM on board. The RAM stacks are connected to the processing units by a 2.5D interposer, similar to that used in recent 'Fiji' GPU products. Memory can be expanded by off-package DDR4 if required.

AMD thinks that its EHP could be popular with supercomputer customers who don't want to pay for custom components designed only for high-end HPC systems. It thinks that high-volume integrated CPU/GPU processor packages (like its APUs) could become a "natural choice for energy-efficient data-parallel computing". Unfortunately 2016/2017 sounds rather distant in tech terms and the wait for trickle down to enthusiasts and consumers will likely be even longer.



HEXUS Forums :: 10 Comments

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“Unfortunately 2016/2017 sounds rather distant in tech terms and the wait for trickle down to enthusiasts and consumers will likely be even longer”

+1 - Let's hope AMD can pull off a general release for consumers as well in this time-frame :)
AFAIK general release for consumers will come before the release of EHP, at least (going on rumors) what is the base (ZEN Core) for EHP is meant for a 2016 release.

At this point I'm more interested to see what AMD does in 2016 than anything coming from Intel.
2016/2017……*yawn*

If we are going to have to wait until 2017 for Zen, it's going to have to be something quite spectacular. Dragging the current AM3 and FM2 offerings out for another 2 years is not going to make them much money and I can't remember the last time I heard of someone purchasing an AMD server in the workplace……
From a quick look the author has IEEE articles about 3D stacked processors going back a decade, I don't think I will be getting too excited about this one.

Looks like the source article would cost me money to download, I'm not that interested :)
One might start to seriously wonder if AMD is even going to exist in 2017…

http://www.techpowerup.com/214365/amd-now-almost-worth-a-quarter-of-what-it-paid-for-ati.html