Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest big data news and analysis.
Daily
Weekly

AMD Touts Bulldozer Flex FP For Technical and Financial Applications

AMD’s John Fruehe blogs about a new feature called “Flex FP” in the company’s upcoming Bulldozer processing cores. Designed to deliver tremendous floating point capabilities for technical and financial applications, Flex FP is a single floating point unit that is shared between two integer cores in a module (so a 16-core “Interlagos” would have 8 Flex FP units).

The beauty of the Flex FP is that it is a single 256-bit FPU that is shared by two integer cores. With each cycle, either core can operate on 256 bits of parallel data via two 128-bit instructions or one 256-bit instruction, OR each of the integer cores can execute 128-bit commands simultaneously. This is not something hard coded in the BIOS or in the application; it can change with each processor cycle to meet the needs at that moment. When you consider that most of the time servers are executing integer commands, this means that if a set of FP commands need to be dispatched, there is probably a high likelihood that only one core needs to do this, so it has all 256-bits to schedule.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIs1CxuUrpc

Resource Links: