Hacker News Reader

So by using a custom compiler someone speeded up an unspecified benchmark by 20%. Is this news?

If that was all it was then no.

However, what they did was demonstrate a novel way of making use of two different processing cores that exist on the chip (namely using both the CPU and an integrated GPU) to improve the performance of their benchmark - which certainly is both interesting and news.

Of course, a proof of concept is a long long way from it being of practical benefit!

A very, very long way, I would guess. A 20% performance gain is nice, but having to power a GPU to get it is not. I would expect that adding a second CPU instead of that GPU almost always will give you more than that 20% performsnce and less heat, for less money.

It depends on the application. If the application, as the article puts it, "pushes polygons around", then I imagine the APU concept may have the advantage.

Though, as previously noted, this APU concept is highly dependent on tailored software (compilers, etc.) and AMD has been banking their strategy on the fact that these critical pieces will take advantage of the APU.

I think the NCSU research (co-sponsored by AMD) is a move in the right direction for determining whether these APUs are an effective solution when compared to the multi-CPU architectures.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com