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Rumor: AMD Delays Fusion to Second Half of 2012

Paul Lilly — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:30:05 -0500

AMD has been talking up its CPU/GPU combo chip codenamed Fusion for some time now, but it might not see the light of day for another three years, according to the latest rumor.

Initially expected in late 2008 or early 2009, Fusion in 45nm form was ultimately scrapped due to design challenges. The same might be happening with 32nm, says news and rumor site Fudzilla, who claims AMD has now decided to wait until it moves to a 22nm manufacturing process, currently scheduled for the second half of 2012.

That sounds like a long time to wait, especially as Intel puts the pressure on with a CPU/GPU chip of its own (Larrabee). For that reason, it's possible AMD may opt to follow in Intel's footsteps and release Fusion constructed with a 32nm IGP and CPU as two separate dies on the same chip. If AMD went this route, it could conceivably have Fusion parts ready by the second half of 2010, Fudzilla says.

AMD's Fusion Delayed Until 2011

Paul Lilly — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:32:36 -0600

When it comes to AMD, the tech world is currently focused on the chip maker's Shanghai processors, which have started showing up at online resellers. Initially planned for a January 2009 release, AMD bumped up the launch of its first 45nm CPUs. But AMD isn't ahead of schedule across the board and the company's 45nm Fusion chip finds itself pushed back once again.

Initially planned for a 2009 release, AMD previously moved the tentative launch date to sometime in 2010 but has now canceled it altogether in its 45nm form. Instead, AMD's senior VP Randy Allen said the CPU/GPU combo won't materialize until 2011 in a 32nm version with the company's Llano core. Llano will sport four cores, 4MB of cache, DDR3 memory support, and an integrated GPU.

On a related note, AMD will actually start producing 32nm chips in 2010, but products won't start to hit the market in any quantity until 2011 starting with the Orochi core, another four-core chip but with 8MB of cache and aimed at the enthusiast desktop sector.

Concerned about the delay? Hit the jump and let us know.

Image Credit: AMD

Exclusive John Carmack Interview, Part 2: Nvidia vs Intel vs ATI

Will Smith — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:55:25 -0500

Click here for the first part of the interview!

Here’s the second part of our exclusive QuakeCon interview with John Carmack. In the first part of our conversation, Carmack discussed his hopes for Quake Live and the id Software’s new gaming direction in Rage. This time around, he gets more into the heady technical stuff with his thoughts on Nvidia’s CUDA, physics accelerators, general purpose computing, and ATI’s rumored Fusion technology.

MaxPC –Can we talk about PhysX and GPUs and Cuda and stuff like that for a sec?

John Carmack – I was well known as not being a supporter of the PhysX accelerators. It’s always felt like a gimmicky plan with people setting up a company to be acquired. For years, the tack has been what do you do with any time Intel delivers something more with processors and more cores? It’s never really proven out right and there’re a lot of reasons for it.

For one thing you can’t scale AI and physics in general with your gameplay, while with graphics, you could scale. Without scaling, you can’t design a game that requires fancy AI and then turn off the fancy AI for the low end systems because practically that’s not possible. Similarly for physics, if it’s anything other than eye candy, you also can’t scale. If the building is going to fall down you need to know whether you’re going to be able to get past it on the high end or the low end.

So what’s happened of course is that PhysX is degenerated to fancy eye candy. You got your fields of grass, you got your walls of blocks that come tumbling down and things that aren’t crucial to the actual game, and that is just a fancy cookie that you throw at the player, which admittedly has some value. So in terms of the general purpose acceleration it was clear even when AGEIA was starting, that we knew that the graphics processors are going to be getting more generalized, and we never thought that they had any special sauce in their hardware that was fundamentally going to be better.

So what’s going on with the Cuda approach is and I think Nvidia is being very wise about their approach where they’ve brought in something early on so some people could start getting some things done with Cuda. So they’ve got a community of high performance computing research guys working with Cuda and it’s great because it’s so important to get that out of your labs and into a customer’s lab and just seeing how things work in the real world. They’re going to have several generations of extra insight over Intel by the time larrabee ships.

Right now the switch between GPU and Cuda is a really heavyweight switch. In the next-gen stuff, it’s much more lightweight so you can toggle back and forth, and in the future, it’s all mix and match. They’ll [eventually] run GPU and Cuda processes simultaneously and it opens up a lot more avenues for computation. There are still some fundamental worries that I have about vector length on there where all of these things that are set up to be GPUs first they’ve all got very long vector lengths. So while you may have a 128 sort of banks of threads, each of them are doing 32 things at the same time. I still see a huge potential for miserable utilization where even if you could suck up all the threads, if you don’t have something that can use wide vectorization, you wind up with only 5% utilization.

MPC – that combined with the heavy switch is disastrous right now, right?

JC- Yeah, you can’t really use it in a game right now. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but it’s going to in the near future and by the time we get to next-gen console stuff all of that is going to be a nice finely integrated stuff. Right now you have this continuum from a general purpose processor like we’ve got as the main CPUs on the 360 or the PS3, then you’ve got like the Cells which are general purpose processors but they’re all wide vector with no caches special DMAs. Then you got things like Cuda thread processors and each one is more hassle than the other and the one before that.

The Cuda processors are moving up, clearly. They’re going to get caches and more general purpose programming abilities but they’re not going to be all the way to what larrabee is doing which is really independent processors with a couple of cores and a couple of threads. It’s going to be interesting to see how all that plays out where, my suspicion is that for a lot of applications they’re designing and benchmarking for, Intel will wind up having good performance. But the internals of it, the software that they write for it is pretty ugly while the code that you could write for Cuda is pretty clean.

I think Intel is going to be fine on the peak performance numbers and will probably have a process advantage, which is always one of Intel’s big hammers. So it’s going to be interesting how Nvidia’s greater experience in utilizing all this parallelism plays out versus the kind of might that Intel is going to have in their raw process advantage in applications.

MPC – Where does ATI fall into this?

JC – We’ve gotten the pitches on the Fusion project and how they’re putting it together with the more general purpose stuff, like with the AMD CPUs on it. We have less insight into that than we have into other projects. In general ATI doesn’t have quite a good developer relations support as we get from Intel and Nvidia. Again, it’s going to be interesting to see how all that plays out. I know their market share isn’t doing real well on the different PC cards.

MPC – Do you think an open API will help them?

JC – It’s a tough thing because I think that trying to spec an API for experimental hardware like this is really tough, and like I said last night it’s very different than what it was with graphics where we had examples of all that research that had been done and we knew how to do it and we were just cleaning it up and doing it better.

But in this type of situation, we really can’t say that anybody that gets up there and clearly acts like they know exactly the way things are going, is just putting up a good front because the work just hasn’t been done yet. Nobody has written major applications that are working on these things, and one of these approaches may turn out to be fundamentally better than the other. We just don’t know which one.

AMD Fusion Details Leaked

Paul Lilly — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:38:51 -0500

AMD's acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI continues to be a sour point whenever the company talks about its finances, most recently coming up when AMD said it would take a near billion dollar charge in the second quarter. Given AMD's financial status, it's easy to criticize the company's decision to overpay for a company that has yet to benefit impatient investors. That could change if AMD's Fusion ends up revolutionizing the PC landscape.

Up to this point, AMD hasn't gone into specifics regarding its upcoming CPU+GPU chip, but according to TGDaily, industry sources aren't being as tight-lipped. If the rumblings are to be believed, the first Fusion processor (code-named Shrike) will consist of a dual-core Phenom CPU and an ATI RV800 GPU core, Previous rumors had the first run Fusion chips built around a dual-core Kuma CPU and RV710 graphics chip, but those plans appear to have gone by the wayside as AMD has had more time to develop a low-end RV800-based core.

The sources also indicate that Fusion will likely be introduced as a half-node chip built around a 40nm manufacturing process, and will later move to 32nm, possibly by the beginning of 2010.

Leaked AMD Slide Reveals its Ultra-Portable Plans

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:13:22 -0500

Intel and VIA are concentrating their resources on developing the least power-sapping processors to wrest the lucrative ultra-portables market. But they might soon have to contend with a late entrant. A leaked slide on Gottabemobile suggests that AMD is going to enter the low-voltage processor race with its Shrike platform.

Assuming the authenticity of the slide and veracity of Gottabemobile, the Shrike platform will be the first manifestation of AMD’s exciting Fusion platform, and so, will have a GPU and CPU on the same dye. The slide proudly proclaims Shrike to be the first Accelerated Processing Unit. If this does head to ultra-portables then it will certainly spruce up their limited graphical capabilities.

Image Credit: Gottabemobile