Although only few commercial products have emerged as yet from the accelerated computing initiative announced by AMD in June 2006, the company believes it has moved the effort past the first phase of a three-stage strategy to make specialized processing engines more commercially viable, according to Doug O'Flaherty, division manager for acceleration strategies at AMD.

"While we are certainly not proclaiming the death of the standalone processor, AMD believes we are at the end stages of the 'one size fits all' computing model," O'Flaherty said. "The ability to tailor parts of your platform with specialized silicon or software to gain specific application performance benefits will be a reality of the next generation of silicon."

The first phase of AMD's effort has been a bit of a "chicken and egg" effort as the company has attempted to promote its approach and worked with industry bodies to define standards that will enable tighter integration of processors such as AMD's Opteron with co-processors, graphics processor and other logic arrays that can improve overall performance and efficiency.

AMD believes it is entering the second phase of its accelerated computing effort and that there will be much broader support and commercialization of customized and optimized processor chip-sets over the next 12 to 18 months. In the third phase, rapid adoption would make the third-party enabled platforms significant contributors to AMD's bottom line.

By: DocMemory
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