AMD: CPU/GPU 'Fusion' May Be More Gradual, Past 2009

From Richard's descriptions, it appears unlikely at this point that Fusion architecture will ever represent a mainstream AMD technology, or in other words, will ever be truly integrated into the company's CPU roadmap. Instead, think of the technology as a kind of "sandwich," where each successive generation removes some of the slices in-between.

Speaking hypothetically, AMD's Richard said, "You could, for example, imagine that the first version of a Fusion product is an MCM [multi-chip module], where you have nothing else but a CPU and a GPU on the same die connected through the same socket. Then the next revision could be, of course, in the silicon. I'm not telling you that we're going to do an MCM, I'm just saying, I've seen a lot of writing on Fusion and people tend to confuse the fact that it's really an over-arching idea, an architecture, a thinking rather than just one product. If you think about Fusion as an architecture, and where we want to take a large part of computing platforms, there's many ways to get there, and there'll be many flavors of Fusion."

At the point where both GPU and CPU finally share the same die, it may then become time to start determining the best "slice-and-dice," to borrow Richard's term, for allocating functional procedures among cores and pipelines.

But that's not where Fusion will begin. "That's probably more like 'Gen 2,"' he remarked, "because initially, you're really going to have an x86 CPU and a GPU on the same die using standard interfaces, standard APIs, and collaborating within a power envelope that will be optimized, to provide a better user experience because of the processing power available, sharing the memory, etc. So I think Fusion's first implementation is really about power envelopes, power efficiency, bringing high-quality graphics experience to what is essentially an embedded motherboard GPU, but there's a lot of other exciting opportunities, and one that you pointed out which is to start combining those two computing cores to do things slightly different than in the traditional Windows world as it is defined today, that's interesting. That might not be the first thing we'll do."

In other words, "Gen 1" of Fusion might be devoted to embedded ATI GPUs on AMD motherboards with AMD chipsets, and determining how to improve communications between those components while reducing power.

"There's some great immediate value that you can get out of a Fusion-type product, that are realistic in the timeframe that we've announced," Richard concluded. "Then there is a beginning of what is a revolution, and a change in the way architectures will be thought of. Fusion is really the first instantiation. So I think it'll be a staged process, and we're not going to try to completely change the way computing cores are reacting and acting with each other on the first generation. That would be probably needing more work than what can be done in the timeframe of reference."