Posted 07/27/09 at 09:30:05 AM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 11/17/08 at 08:32:36 AM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 08/08/08 at 03:55:25 PM by Will Smith

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. Here’s a snippet:

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.

Click through for the good stuff.

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Posted 08/04/08 at 10:38:51 PM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 06/27/08 at 04:13:22 PM by Pulkit Chandna

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.com 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.

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