AMD Fusion Details Leaked

negRo_slim writes "AMD has 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."

Comments

Re:Anyone with more knowledge explain this to me

[cnettel]

A higher level of integration makes sense for laptops. Putting the GPU with the CPU also makes a lot more sense when we consider that the CPU these days also means the place closest to the memory controllers.

In addition, you have an interconnect between the two which is far faster than anything else available today. However, there is no code today that will use it explicitly, the whole paradigm of a GPU is that you do not read data back to the CPU.

So, for now, the benefits are really physical size and cost. A CPU-integrated graphics core can be better than one placed on the motherboard when you have an integrated memory controller, but a separate card with dedicated RAM should beat both, as long as you do not expect a new "chatty" paradigm of GPU usage.

Re:AMDs problem.

[nxtw]

Thats interesting, because I'm typing this on my quad-core laptop.. www.pcmicroworks.com www.sager.com www.dell.com/xps

Quadcore laptops arent even rare anymore. Expensive, yes, but still pretty common..

Yes, they are still rare. The few "laptops" with quad-core CPUs are using power-hungry desktop or server class CPUs and weigh over >10 lbs. You won't see a quad-core CPU in a traditional (less than 7 lbs.) laptop until these hit the market in the near future.

Re:Anyone with more knowledge explain this to me

[HickNinja]

I think the chatty paradigm of GPU usage will be more fine-grained "stream computing." When the latency between CPU and GPU is lower, and you share the same cache, the penalty for setting up and launching stream computing tasks on the GPU becomes lower, enabling more things to be accelerated this way.

The old way, you only really got benefits from stream computing if you were able to set up a massive job for the GPU, set it on its task, wait for completion, and then get the results. Now, maybe new classes of apps become more feasible.

Re:Anyone with more knowledge explain this to me

[Chris Burke]

So, for now, the benefits are really physical size and cost.

Power, more than size. Off-chip buses like Hypertransport are fairly power intensive, and now CPUGPU communication won't have to leave the chip. Depending on how they do the integration with the memory controller, it could also mean that less of the chip needs to be active when doing nothing more than screen refreshes from the frame buffer. But the HT link is a pretty big deal power-wise.