AMD Fusion - CPU & GPU Integration

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D3v1an7

[H]ard|Gawd
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http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=MjI0OTUsLCxobmV3cywsLDE=

What does everyone think about this?

My first impression is this is going to stifle upgrades by tying the two chips together and making 1 more costly product. Instead of a $300+ vid card and a $300+ CPU, you'll have to buy 1 $600 + chip ever time something new comes out making each upgrade much more costly.

If it were up to me, I'd suggest keeping the two chips separate but making a dedicated GPU socket on the hyper transport bus to allow for high speeds but individual upgrades as necessary.

Does this mean that AMD's future multi-core chips will have specialized cores for certain types of processing or will the chips be able to dedicate general cores to specific tasks? Will there be 10 different chips depending on what you initially plan on using your computer for?

I guess I just don't understand where AMD is going with this. Anyone else have any information?
 
It's part of the same integration process that's pulled the floating point processor, cpu cache, and (for AMD) ram controller onto the die, that's consolidated the mobo chipset into two parts while continually adding more functionality onboard. If you look bag far enough, even things like your harddrive controllers were on expansion cards, not the mobo. the integration reduces latency for better performance and reduces manufacturing costs. UNless the gain's are spectacular, at least initially I suspect it'll be largely confined to low/midrange consumer systems, and with time spread to higher end systems. Kinda like onboard sound. 5 or 6 years ago, it was almost exclusively on budget boxes because the quality was too poor, since then it's improved, and progressively fewer PCs are using soundcards.
 
From my understanding, ATI used a technology in their X1900s that allocate many cores at the same time. It seems AMD bought ATI out partially for this reason, because once we are at 4 and 8 cores a management system will be just as important as the cores themselves.

Keep in mind intels quad will be 2 seperate core 2 duos, so if core 1 wants to talk to 3 it has to go across the FSB.
 
You should search google for terascale processing. It's having a CPU with 32 or more cores - Intel had a demo of 80 cores. With this many cores, the best idea would be to split up the execution of different programs on different cores, and to specialize those cores for the programs. Hence video apps will use GPU-style cores.

Plus, terascale processing will require an all new way of feeding data to so many cores. Intel recommended that one way is to use a ring-bus style architecture. I think AMD will go with this, as why they bought ATi, who already has their first generation of ringbus tech on the market already. After all, a GPU is simply a specific-purpose CPU with many many cores on it (8800 GTX has 128 shader cores - and we've only reached 4 in the CPU)
 
So, with Intel's 80 core "CPU" Do you think we'll see something like 8 Cores with say 64 Stream Cores on the same die in say 3 years?

This would mean perhapes that in 3-5 years games like HL2 could run with just a CPU and no GPU?!

It seems like the way things are going, you have CPU/GPU with the GPU acting more like a co-processor of sorts. If game/physics/rendering preformance isn't as good, you add a PCI-E 'GPU' and programs will be able to use that 'GPU' as another 'CPU' to help speed things along?

So, I disagree that...

My first impression is this is going to stifle upgrades by tying the two chips together and making 1 more costly product. Instead of a $300+ vid card and a $300+ CPU, you'll have to buy 1 $600 + chip ever time something new comes out making each upgrade much more costly.
Click to expand...
 
If they were talking about just dedicating cores to software processing of the video information then I wouldn't be as concerned, but they are talking about slapping a GPU onto the same silicone as the CPU. To me, that means that the next time a revision of Direct X comes out you will be forced to buy a new CPU/GPU combo instead of just a vid card and with as fast a socket designs are changing in the AMD world, a simple GPU upgrade could turn into a $2000 complete computer rebuild.
 
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