AMD’s First Fusion Processors to be Launched in 2010?

At the beginning of the year, Intel launched its Clarkdale and Arrandale processors, built on the Westmere micro-architecture. A couple of things made these special. One of the more important aspects was that the chip was built on a 32nm process. But secondly, and probably more interesting is that under the one hood, there laid both a CPU and GPU.

As we saw from our performance results, having the two chips next to one another didn’t really yield major benefits compared to having the IGP in the Northbridge, but there were other benefits aside from only performance. Overall, we were impressed with Intel’s chip, and we wondered when AMD would come around with its own Fusion design, especially since it had announced such plans before Intel ever did.

Well, according to a recent chat with Bit-Tech, AMD not only has some working silicon, but it looks as though we may actually see a launch sometime in 2010, an improvement over the original speculated launch in 2011. While Intel beat AMD to the CPU+GPU punch, AMD’s solution will be a lot more attractive from a technical standpoint, as the CPU and GPU will be one fused chip, not two separate chips laid side-by-side as in Clark/Arrandale.

Whether or not we’ll see gains from having a true fusion design is yet to be seen, and may actually be quite hard to predict and understand. General logic would say that things like power efficiency could be improved, and possibly also performance, but it’s really hard to say. IGP’s in general are not all too powerful to begin with, which complicates discovering true gains.

Whatever the result, to have the hope of seeing a true fusion design from AMD this year is rather exciting. We can all hope that it will be a fierce competitor to Intel’s similar solution, especially since it’s being released a fair bit later.

“There was a fair bit of engineering work involved too, but we just have a tradition of building a piece of silicon from the ground up, in fact the only MCM (Multi-Chip Module) solution I’m aware of that we’ve ever done is on the server side with our 12-core product (the Opteron 6174). [Regardless], what we’ll be launching with Fusion is definitely all on one die.”