Legit Reviews

with all the talk about GPGPU's out there does anyone else think that the GPU in Fusion might be able to be developed into an onboard "bridge chip" allowing the remaining cores to be used as 1 single core? which would provide greatly increased performance on single threaded apps?

just a weird idea I had

Wouldn't work, Single Core performances really only matters with clock speed, so at a point it starts to level out, where as the more cores you have, then performance can go higher, but off course your program must be able to handle the multiple threads and cores

Multi threaded programs is the future!

IMO there's no need to develop a new CPU architecture for something that's going to be obsolete in a while.

I think that Fusion is a big deal and it will be a chance for AMD to jump ahead in front of Intel if everything goes just right and Intel falters down the road with a product launch (Nehelam or beyond). It's too early to see what all Fusion will be able to do, but it should revolutionize the entry level and mainstream PC's.

Apoptosis wrote:it should revolutionize the entry level and mainstream PC's.

well that's about all AMD CAN shoot for at this point, after phenom stumbled over itself in the performance areas.

but who knows, it may end up the way it usually does, with intel coming back out on top within a year after launch or even before.

With AMD giving up on the enthusiast processor competition with Intel it shows that AMD is not going to focus on the top end any longer. Gone are the days of the FX processor to compete with the Extreme series from Intel. I think AMD made the right move here as the currently don't have a product that can compete. Lots of companies have ditched what people believe is their bread and butter lately only to move on to areas that can produce more profit. Look at GE last week... General Electric plans to auction off its appliances business. In case you missed it GE has hired Goldman Sachs to run an auction for the appliance division. GE is going to give up the appliance side of things even thought they sell between $5 billion and $8 billion worth of appliances a year. People are already saying that they are going to focus more on media (they own NBC). When you say GE I think appliances and jet engines, but their marketing team says people under 21 know GE as a media company...

AMD isn't shifting focus this badly, but they are taking a leap with Fusion. I think the timing is right and if they can make Fusion energy efficient they can and more than likely will have a huge green push showing how much energy schools, offices, governments and home consumers can save by using the Fusion processor. If they delay the launch though they will be f'd as Intel more than likely has something in the works also.

Unfortunately Fusion will be just a 45nm K10 (Shanghai) coupled with an IGP. Originally it was supposed to be based on an entirely new CPU core architecture dubbed Bulldozer. Apparently Bulldozer got delayed by some years due to financials.

See page 16:
http://download.amd.com/Corporate/Mario ... ystDay.pdf

I have a feeling K10 is becoming a huge big mistake for AMD...


K8 -> DC K8 -> QC K8 -> K10 -> Bulldozer
I'd imagine skipping K10 entirely, and instead, retrofitting 65nm K8 with small caches and non-native (=MCM) quad core support would have been the smarter choice...

This is in the works sorry if someone posted it before but I did not see it
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/7368-inte ... -in-2009-/
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/ ... u-on-a-cpu

Should see sample of these soon I would expect to see them in the next few months.

Those are somewhat outdated news pieces.


Lynnfield (Nehalem mainstream QC) won't have an iGPU. Havendale (Nehalem value DC) does. I wonder if the iGPU will be some variant of the infamous Intel GMAs...