The Outlook On AMD's Fusion Plans

PreacherTom writes "Now that AMD's acquisition of ATI is complete, what do the cards hold for the parent company? According to most experts, it's a promising outlook for AMD . One of the brightest stars in AMD's future could be the Fusion program, which will 'fuse' AMD's CPUs with ATI's GPUs (graphics processing units) in a single, unified processor. The product is expected to debut in late 2007 or early 2008. Fusion brings a hopes of energy efficiency, with the CPU and GPU residing on a single chip. Fusion chips could also ease the impact on users who plan to use Windows Vista with Aero, an advanced interface that will only run on computers that can handle a heavy graphics load. Lastly, the tight architecture provided by Fusion could lead to a new set of small, compelling devices that can handle rich media."

Comments

Stock tip ...

[guysmilee]

Invest in heat sinks! :-)

Re:Stock tip ...

[jandrese]

Yeah, but the heatsink for the processor/graphics card combo system will be righteous.

Frankly, I'm betting this is going to turn out more like the next generation of integrated video. Basically, the only "fusion" chips you'll see will be ones designed for small/cheap boxes that people never upgrade the components on. I'm betting the graphics in general will be slow and the processor will be average. Super fast processors and fast graphics won't get the fusion treatment because the people who buy them tend to want to keep them separate (for upgrading later), not to mention the difficulty you'd have powering and cooling a chip that complex.

Re:Stock tip ...

[Michael Woodhams]

Yeah, but the heatsink for the processor/graphics card combo system will be righteous.

"Righteous" = "big"?

Intel was making 130W CPUs until AMD got better performance with 60W (although Intel have now overtaken AMD on this.) I've got a 40W GPU which is as powerful as a 100W GPU of a couple of years ago.

A state-of-the-art CPU plus a mid-to-high range GPU today could come in at around 130W. The 130W CPU heat-sink problem is solved (for noisy values of "solved".)

Also, it is much easier to deal with a big heatsink on the motherboard than on a video card - the size and weight are much less restricted.

Hm, perhaps if AMD starts making 100+W fusion chips, they'll start supporting Intels BTX form factors (which were largely designed to improve cooling.) As a silent computing nut, I think this would be a Good Thing.

Airport fun

[LiquidCoooled]

how will homeland security like you bringing home a multi core Fusion through the gates?

"But, but its an AMD processor, built in Germany or Russia or somewhere"

"Teh internet told me it was more powerful than anything else out there."

"It would literally blow me away!"

Re:Airport fun

[PFI_Optix]

So...there are only servers and enthusiasts in the market?

Wow. And here I was thinking there was this vast market for things called "workstations" where businesses didn't need high-end video cards and home systems where users didn't require the best 3D accelerators on the market. Shows what I know.

Even most enthusiasts only replace their video cards every 12-18 months. If a CPU/GPU combo was in the same price range as a current video card (not farfetched) then there'd be no reason not to use a combo chip.

But hey, feel free to waste hundreds of dollars just because you think you know how things will work. Don't let the facts get in the way of your fanaticism.

Re:Airport fun

[PFI_Optix]

You assume that this would do away with video cards; there's not a chance of that happening any time soon. As I said in another thread, it'd be quite simple for AMD to disable the on-chip video in favor of a detected add-in card.

Right now I'm buying a $200 vidcard every 18-24 months. I'm looking at probably getting my next one middle of next year, around the same time I replace my motherboard, CPU, and RAM. My current system is struggling with the Supreme Commander beta and upcoming games like Crysis should be equally taxing on it. In the past six years, I've bought three CPU upgrades. If AMD could market a $300 chip that gave me a CPU and GPU upgrade with similar performance and stay on the same socket for 3-4 years, I'd be breaking even.

Re:Airport fun

[BigFootApe]

I believe they would simply re-purpose the onboard shaders for general computing.

A better way to spend they money would be on PR...

[Channard]

.. or advertising on TV. I work in a computer shop and it seems loads of people have no idea who the hell AMD are. I've explained that they're just competitors to a lot of customers, but still the customers go 'No, I've been told to get an Intel.' I can't recall having ever seen an AMD ad on telly at all.

power efficiency??

[Klintus Fang]

yeah. i'm also wondering how putting the two hottest components on the mother board (the GPU and CPU) into the same package is a power savings... :-/ maybe on the low end of the market where the performance of the GPU is irrelevant, but for those who actually care about GPU performance, putting the two most power hungry and memory bw hungry components together doesn't seem like a good idea.

Re:power efficiency??

[RuleBritannia]

Any kind of integration tends to improve power efficiency just because of the high capacitance of the PCB traces. This makes it difficult to route a PCB for high-speed inter-chip communications never mind getting multiple 2.5Gb/s (PCIe) signal traces through a connector. All this requires large driver cells to drive off-chip communication and these use a great deal of power (and moderate area) on chip. Reducing the noise floor of your signals (by keeping them on chip) also gives you more headroom for voltage reductions in your digital hardware. All in all it makes it a much better picture overall for power efficiency. But dissipating power from these new chips will still be a headache for CPU package designers and systems guys alike.

Re:A better way to spend they money would be on PR

[scuba_steve_1]

...which may explain how AMD has managed to keep their costs low over the years. Word of mouth is compelling...even to the point that many folks that I know are now biased against Intel...even though we are at a unique point where AMD's advantage has eroded...at least for the moment.

Bad idea for upgrades

[rjmars97]

Although I can see the potential efficiency increases, combining the GPU and CPU into one chip means that you will be forced to upgrade one when you only want to upgrade the other. To me, this seems like a bad idea in that AMD would have to make dozens of GPU/CPU combinations. Say I want one of AMD's chips in my headless server, am I going to have to buy a more expensive processor because it has a high powered GPU that I don't want or need? What if I want to build a system with a good processor to start, but due to budget reasons want to hold off on buying a good video card?

Combining the CPU and GPU may make sense for embedded systems or as a replacement for integrated graphics, but I cannot see it working for those who prefer to have specific components based on other factors.

Re:Bad idea for upgrades

[hairpinblue]

I can appreciate that an integrated CPU/GPU combination may have advantages in many arenas. It feels like a Bad Idea, though, in the same way that televisions with integrated VHS players were a bad idea, and all-in-one stereo systems didn't become a Good Idea until they came down both in price and physical size. In general I'm not comfortable with someone else bundling my technology for me. I'll be more than happy to accept the cost of keeping up to date with researching the individual components, and accepting the small performance drawback of the data bus between processor, memory, and the video card. In some ways it feels like a cog in the wheel of advancing TC and DRM. In other ways it's really inevitable since video display is such an enormously processor intensive task. The computer, for the majority of the population, has become an entertainment device similar to what the television and radio were in progressively earlier generations. Even with the push to F/OSS taking off and catching the attention of more and more consumers the end tasks are solidifying and standardizing for the vast majority of the population. Logically speaking why wouldn't the industry begin to solidify and standardize more and more of the components within the product? Look for the reintroduction of integrated audio chipsets, and maybe even their integration into the processor core, for a single unified network entertainment box (SuneB) rather than a real computer. Then where will the F/OSS movement go? By the time the SuneB hits we'll be back to OS on a chip (much like the Amiga had 20 years ago, or TV set-top network boxes, which the Amiga became in Escom's and later QVDs hands, have, or DVD players have). Technology really seems more and more cyclical every time I see it evolving and progressing.

As a hobbyist, though, this sort of move makes me uncomfortable and maybe even a little bit sad. I've always liked the puzzles that computers bring: programming, building, troubleshooting, compiling, security monitoring, maintaining, and even the jargon and zealotry that comes with being a computer enthusiast. When computers have become a standard black box commodity what will be the next hobby puzzle to hold my interest?

Oh. And yes. I'd like to claim intellectual property on the SuneB. Sure, the industry will call it something else and all the patents will have a different name, but at least, 10 years from now when a SuneB clone company is the driving force on the stock market, I can sit back and think to myself,"Somewhere on Slashdot there's a post proving that I should be a billionaire rather than a corporate wage-slave."

So...

[FlyByPC]

Energy efficiency...
Project named Fusion...
...
Please tell me Pons and Fleischmann aren't behind this?

Heat???

[pla]

Although CPUs have gotten better in the past year, GPUs (particularly ATI's) still keep outdoing each other in just how much power they can suck.

With a decent single-GPU gaming rig drawing over 200W just between the CPU and GPU, do they plan to start selling water cooling kits as the stock boxed cooler?

Re:Heat???

[Pulzar]

Although CPUs have gotten better in the past year, GPUs (particularly ATI's) still keep outdoing each other in just how much power they can suck.

You're talking about the high-end "do everything you can" GPUs... ATI is dominating the (discrete) mobile GPU industry because their mobile GPUs use so little power. Integrating (well) one of those into a CPU should still result in a low-power chip.

Yes but

[Ant P.]

Will it run Linux less than half a year after it's obsoleted by the next version?

Disaster for Linux and OSS

[hirschma]

Whoa. You're going to need a closed-source kernel driver to use your CPU now? They can eat me. The graphics driver situation is bad enough.

This one is untouchable until they open up the graphics drivers - or goodbye AMD/ATI.

jh

Re:Disaster for Linux and OSS

[Kookus]

No, you just won't have the extra functionality of the graphics portion of the chip... Which, hey!, isn't any different then today!

but...

[Hangin10]

does this mean ATI will be opening up its GPU programming specs, or merely what is being stated (that graphics chip and CPU will share a die) ?

Servers use video cards?

[milgr]

Gee, most of the servers I use don't have a video card. Some of the servers have serial ports. Others talk over a proprietary fabric - and pretend to have a serial connection (and maybe even VGA). I don't need to walk into the lab to get to the server's virtual consoles.

Coming to think of it, the way we have things set up, the console is inaccessible from the lab - but accessible via terminal concentrators - over the lan.

Maybe...

[MobyDisk]

The article says that this might be attractive to businesses: I can see that since most businesses don't care about graphics. This is similar to businesses buying computers with cheap on-board video cards. But that means they will be profiting on the low-end. It seems like this is more of a boon for laptops and consoles: Currently, laptops with decent video cards are expensive and power-hungry. Same with consoles. But for mid-range and high-end systems, there must be a modular bus connecting these two parts since they are likely to evolve at different rates, and likely to be swapped-out individually.

Linux Drivers

[turgid]

I've been an nVidia advocate since 1999 when I bought a TNT2 Ultra for playing Quake III Arena under Linux on my (then) K6-2 400.

I'm on my 4th nVidia graphics card, and I have 6 machines, all running Linux. One is a 10-year-old UltraSPARC, one has an ATI card.

Despite slashbot rantings about the closed-source nVidia drivers, and despite my motley collection of Frankenstein hardware, I've never had a problem with the nVidia stuff. The ATI stuff is junk. The drivers are pathetic (open source) and the display is snowy, and the performance it rubbish.

I hope AMD do something about the Linux driver situation.

My next machine will be another AMD, this time with dual dual-core processors and I'll be doing my own Slackware port, but I'll be buying an nVidia graphics card.

Re:Linux Drivers

[Chris Burke]

Despite slashbot rantings about the closed-source nVidia drivers, and despite my motley collection of Frankenstein hardware, I've never had a problem with the nVidia stuff. The ATI stuff is junk. The drivers are pathetic (open source) and the display is snowy, and the performance it rubbish.

Well if you do 3D gaming on Linux, you're used to closed source drivers, since there hasn't really been another choice since the 3dfx Voodoo -- who won me over by supporting Linux, if not the Free Software philosophy behind it. NVidia similarly works. The ATI drivers are terrible, and I'm not talking the open source ones.

I hope AMD do something about the Linux driver situation.

Me too, because I'm sick of having only one practical choice for graphics cards. Not that I really have any complaints with NVidia, but it would be nice to be able to pick the best card, not the one that I can count on to work.

I'm hopeful, just because AMD has been a big supporter of Linux and gcc, particularly in getting them to support AMD64. I guess we'll see.

It's for laptops and budget systems

[Chris Burke]

Especially the former, where you can't really upgrade anyway and you typically have a GPU soldered to the board.

The advantages of a combined CPU/GPU in this space are:
1) Fewer chips means a cheaper board.
2) The GPU is connected directly to the memory interface, so UMA solutions will not suck nearly as hard.
3) No HT hop to get to the GPU, so power is saved on the interface and CPU-GPU communication will be very low latency.

I highly doubt AMD is planning on using combined CPU/GPU solutions on their mainstream desktop parts, and they are absolutely not going to do so for server parts. I think in those spaces they'd much rather have four cores on the CPU, and let you slap in the latest-greatest (ATI I'm sure they hope, but if NVidia gives them the best benchmark score vs Intel chips then so be it) graphics card.

AMD has already distinguished their server, mobile, desktop, and value lines. They are not going to suddenly become retarded and forget that these markets have different needs and force an ATI GPU on all of them.

Re:It's for laptops and budget systems

[racerx509]

This product will most likely find its way into the mobile industry. Imagine a laptop with a *decent* 3d accelerator that uses low power and can actually run a 3d game at a good frame rate, without weighing a ton or singing your knees. They may be onto something here.

Re:It's for laptops and budget systems

[modeless]

I highly doubt AMD is planning on using combined CPU/GPU solutions on their mainstream desktop parts, and they are absolutely not going to do so for server parts

I think they are, and I think it's the right choice. The GPU that will be integrated will not be today's GPU, but a much more general processor. Look at NVidia's G80 for the beginning of this trend; they're adding non-graphics-oriented features like integer math, bitwise operations, and soon double-precision floating point. G80 has 128 (!) fully general-purpose SISD (not SIMD) cores, and soon with their CUDA API you will be able to run C code on them directly instead of hacking it up through DirectX or OpenGL.

AMD's Fusion will likely look a lot more like a Cell processor than, say, Opteron + X1900 on the same die. ATI is very serious about doing more than graphics: look at their CTM initiative (now in closed beta); they are doing the previously unthinkable and publishing the *machine language* for their shader engines! They want businesses to adopt this in a big way. And it makes a lot of sense: with a GPU this close to the CPU, you can start accelerating tons of things, from scientific calculations to SQL queries. Basically *anything* that is parallelizable can benefit.

I see this as nothing less than the future of desktop processors. One or two x86 cores for legacy code, and literally hundreds of simpler cores for sheer calculation power. Forget about games, this is much bigger than that. These chips will do things that are simply impossible for today's processors. AMD and Intel should both be jumping to implement this new paradigm, because it sets the stage for a whole new round of increasing performance and hardware upgrades. The next few years will be an exciting time for the processor business.

Re:this will fail

[NSIM]

Do you really want to have to replace an entire system when you upgrade? You buy a Dell, a new game comes out 6 months and your system can't play it reasonably well. So then you either a) buy a new system or b) gut in a video card and not use the one on the proc.

Integrating the GPU with the CPU will be about driving down cost and power consumption, not something that is usually a high-priority for folks that want to run the latest greatest games and get all the shiniest graphics. So, I'd be very surprised if this is intended to hit that part of the market, more likely it's designed to address the same market segment that Intel hits with graphics embedded in the CPU's supporting chipset.

That said, having the CPU & GPU combined (from the point of view of register and memory access etc) might open up some interesting new possibilities of using the the power of the GPU for certain non-graphic functions.

Back in the day at Intergraph we had a graphics processor that could be combined with a very expensive (and for the time powerful) dedicated floating point array processor. To demonstrate the power of that add-on somebody handcoded an implementation of the Mandelbrot Fractal algorithm on the add-on and it was blistering fast. I can imagine similar highly-parallelized algorithms doing very well on a GPU/CPU combo.

At the risk of being modded reundant

[kimvette]

I'm going to ask:

That's great and all, but does it run Linux?

I'm not kidding, either. Is AMD going to force ATI to open up its specs and its drivers so that we can FINALLY get stable and FULLY functional drivers for Linux, or are they still going to be partially-implemented limited-function binary blobs where support for older-yet-still-in-distribution-channels products will be phased out in order to "encourage" (read: force) customers to upgrade to new hardware, discarding still-current computers?

That is why I do not buy ATI products any more. They provide ZERO VIVO support in Linux, They phase out chip support in drivers even while they are actively distributed. They do not maintain compatibility of older drivers to ensure they can be linked to the latest kernels.

This is why I went Core 2 Duo for my new system and do not run AMD - their merger with ATI. My fear is that if ATI rubs off on AMD then support for AMD processors and chipsets will only get worse, not better.

Re:At the risk of being modded reundant

[Chris Burke]

This is why I went Core 2 Duo for my new system and do not run AMD - their merger with ATI. My fear is that if ATI rubs off on AMD then support for AMD processors and chipsets will only get worse, not better.

It is pretty typical in a buyout like this for the larger company's culture to dominate the smaller one. While in many cases this is a bad thing as the smaller company has the more open culture, in this case it is the larger company, AMD, that is more open.

It is ridiculous to think that support for AMD chipsets and processors will get worse since AMD has utterly depended on Linux to jump start the 64-bit x86 market. Oh, and a processor is nothing if it doesn't expose its interfaces, because they count on programmers to use those new instructions or modes or whatever to optimize their programs and make the processor look good. There is no DirectX or OpenGL equivalent that processors hide behind.

Re:At the risk of being modded reundant

[asuffield]

That is why I do not buy ATI products any more.

So you use SiS chipsets then? They're the only manufacturer I can think of who still provide specs for their video chips (or do Intel still do that too?).

Unfortunately we're currently stuck with a range of equally sucky choices. I tend to buy (older) ATI cards because at least they get reverse-engineered drivers, eventually.

GPU or GPGPU?

[tbcpp]

From what I understand (and I could be wrong), AMD/ATI is aiming more at the GPGPU market. So we're talking more of a suped up altivec processor in the CPU instead of a full blown GPU. It sounds like the're simply adding a 64 pipleline vector processor to the existing x86-64 core. I'm not sure if this is a bad idea.

I remember programming assembly graphics code in BASIC back in the day. You would set the VGA card to mode 13h and then write to...what was it now...0xa00? That's probably wrong. Anyway, whatever your wrote to that portion of memory would go to the screen.

If you had a huge SIMD co-processor, would it not be possible to rival modern GPUs with this model? Not to mention being able to do some cool stuff like having a video input card dump data driectly into that portion of the screen. So you could have video in with the CPU at complete idle.

Not what you think

[Anonymous Coward]

My people are reading this as an integrated GPU and CPU. I don't see it that way. I see it as adding a generic vector processor to the CPU. Similar to the Cell processor and similar to future plans Intel has described. Vector processors are similar to SSE, 3DNow, etc. They are SIMD processors that can execute very regular mathematical computations (Video and audio encoding/decoding) VERY quickly, but aren't much good for generic algorithms.

Re:Not what you think

[organgtool]

My people are reading this as an integrated GPU and CPU.

So let me get this straight: you own slaves AND you force them to read Slashdot. You, sir, should be punished for crimes against humanity.

A step between on-board video, and full graphics

[Vellmont]

The people claiming this will fail all seem to miss the market this is aimed at. It's obviously not intended to compete with the high-end, or even middle of the road graphics processor. Those boards require gobs of VERY fast video memory. My guess is this thing is aimed at a space between the on-board video (which are really just 2-d chips) and the full 3-d graphics card. Anyone buying this has no intention of buying a super-duper

With Vista coming out soon, PC-makers are going to want a low-cost 3-d accelerated solution to be able to run some (or maybe all) of the eye-candy that comes with vista.

For the sake of competition...

[Wilson_6500]

Let's hope this fusion doesn't bomb.

Re:A better way to spend they money would be on PR

[jernejk]

How about this: http://www.tomshardware.com.tr/business/20050428/i mages/amd-ferrari.jpg http://www.adm02.com/Marketer/AMD/AMD_Opteron_News letter_july/Archives_april_files/ferrari.jpg http://www.pcinpact.com/images/bd/news/10535.jpg This is an EXPENSIVE marketing campaign...

Re:Remember math coprocessors?

[rjstanford]

One thing to consider is that right now its getting pretty easy to have "enough" RAM for 99% of all users. I mean, if you get a new machine today that had 1.5-2.0gb in it, the odds of even wanting to upgrade would be slim to none. The fact is that most people live quite reasonably with 256-512mb right now, and will never upgrade. Note: most /. readers != most people. For modern machines if you're not running anything more brutal than Office, having a gig permanently attached would probably make sense for most people who would be using an integrated graphics type of system.

Re:Upgrades ?

[adsl]

Or you could replace the whole Fusion chipset with the projected Nvidia chipset (release also late 2007) which attaches a CPU onto their graphic chipset.