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GPU and APUs for everyone

AMD shared its glorious five year long GPU and APU roadmap with the world for the first time.

AMD's Junji Hayashi revealed AMD's cunning plan at a special event in Japan.

As we expected AMD's upcoming ARM K12 and it's sister x86 CPU core Zen got a mention AMD wants to develop and introduce both x86 and ARM powered SOCs to the market in a pin for pin compatible platform code named SkyBridge.

The new information that has been revealed this time around is that the K12 and x86 sister core will support "many threads". This means that AMD's upcoming x86 and ARM CPU cores will support simultaneous multi-threading instead of clustered multi-threading which is what AMD's current Bulldozer family of processors support.

Simultaneous Multi-Threading 

Simultaneous Multi-Threading or SMT is a big thing in large CPU cores so that it can take advantage of the various resources in the core which are underutilized and dedicate them to an additional, slower, execution thread for added throughput.

This is a contrast, to clustered multi-threading which shares resources between two different CPU cores, instead of doing it inside a single CPU core.

AMD never really commented about the how much multi-threading support its upcoming cores would have. Now it seems that AMD's K12 ARM core will support "many threads" instead of just supporting one additional thread as is the case with Intel's high performance CPUs.

When it comes to GPUs, Hayashi said AMD will be employing a two year cadence to updating its GPU architecture inside APUs.

AMD GPU Roadmap 2015-2020 AMD will introduce Accelerated Processing Units with updated GPU architectures once every two years.

AMD plans to introduce what it described as a High Performance Computing APU or HPC for short. This APU will carry a sizable TDP between 200 and 300 watts.

APU loves HPC when it is stacked

This sort of APU loves HPC. So far powerful APUs were not attempted because the amount of memory bandwidth required to keep such a powerful APU fed was too much.

Stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory ) will make such designs extremely effective. The second generation of HBM is nine times faster than GDDR5 memory and 128 times faster than DDR3.

Code names for future GPU architectures unfortunately were not revealed. But it is pretty likely that AMD's upcoming GPU architecture to debut on 16nm FinFET will be code named Arctic Islands. We'll know more details in May during the company's scheduled Financial Analyst Day event.

That is our excuse and we are sticking to it

If your boss gets upset with you for watching porn at work you should immediately blame his routers.

A new variant of router malware has been uncovered that injects unwarranted ads and pornography into websites by modifying the router's DNS settings.

The malware can hijack nearly every website on the internet, but it is being mostly used to peddle porn sites.

Uncovered by Ara Labs, the router malware intercepts the Google Analytics code found in most websites, redirecting requests to the attacker's server that sends back ads and porn in response.

Since so many websites use Google Analytics for traffic statistics, it becomes the perfect target for this sort of DNS attack.

It can be quite a lucrative business if the hackers can infect a large number of routers.

The hackers install the malware by exploiting the fact that many people don't change their router's default login credentials. It attempts to send unauthenticated configuration requests to routers.

Ara Labs didn't specify what routers are affected, but keeping your router's firmware up to date and changing the default login credentials pretty much protects the system.

Traditional anti-virus software won't pick up router-based malware, as no component of the malware is actually installed on your PC.