AMD pushed Fusion as one of the main reasons to justify its acquisition of ATI. Since then, AMD’s finances have changed colors and are now deep in the red, the top management has changed, and Fusion still isn’t anything AMD wants to discuss in detail. But there are always “industry sources” and these sources have told us that Fusion is likely to be introduced as a half-node chip. It appears that AMD’s engineers in Dresden, Markham and Sunnyvale have been making lots of trips to little island of Formosa lately - the home of contract manufacturer TSMC, which will be producing Fusion CPUs. Our sources indicated that both companies are quite busy laying out the productions scenarios of AMD’s first CPU+GPU chip.
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I dubt it will be more expensive combining them, and there are benefits like low power consumption, small size, and no latency. This could be great for laptops.
But seriously discrete gpu's only bring in the feature that you can upgrade them at a later date. The only other GPU have not been at cpu standards (integrated with the north bridge, which generally is 2 to 3 technology steps behind GPU production let alone compared to CPU.
My General question is how the Mother board is going to be laid out to allow for a relative short path between memory and the gpgpu section of the combined processor. That is a Limiting factor on todays discrete GPU, and Stream (gpgpu) cards. It would be time to seperate over how a IGP is currently setup to use Main Memory (which is slower than the graphics memory)
GoTenks,
The second question will be what do you want them to do as the number of computing units go up??
by the end of 2009, 8 core will be generally available. 2011 16 core, 2013 32 core, 2015 64 core, 2017 128 core, 2019 256 core. (disclaimer that is if moores law continues (which it appears will be true until 2020)
And GPGPU does so much more than just calculate 3d for imageing.
El
Lets hope Intel do this in their future, and improve their integrated graphics
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