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AMD, the world's second largest CPU manufacturer has big plans for the future of the CPU and the GPU. With the purchase of ATI, AMD has been working for years on a project named AMD Fusion which will place the CPU and GPU onto the same piece of silicon. The resulting APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit, has its advantages since CPUs and GPUs were designed to do serial and parallel calculations respectively; combining these forms a central core where serial and parallel processes can occur simultaneously, creating a powerful graphics and processing core. AMD has already demonstrated a working example of the APU, and plans to debut the technology in 2011. What do you think of AMD Fusion? Is it innovative and do you think it will work well? |
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I think that it will work well, and if Apple plans on switching to AMD as their processor, that would be one of the best times to switch. |
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It will be nice for low-power systems (like low-end desktops) and laptops, assuring that such systems will come with a decent graphics processor onboard. It's not going to change a whole lot for mid-range and high-end desktop computers. Dedicated graphics cards will still be faster than the integrated GPU, so you'll still see plenty of graphics cards being sold. If they're smart about it, they'll figure out some way to use those extra GPU units on the CPU for general computation when a discreet graphics card is present. That way, they don't go wasted. AMD is planning to target both netbooks and desktops. AMD demonstrated that the APU developed for netbooks can run modern graphics-intensive games at good quality, so the power of the desktop targeted APU could possibly compete with top-end CPUs and GPUs. Yes, low-end desktops that would otherwise have integrated graphics will benefit from this. It will, in no way, be able to compete with top end graphics cards. Modern CPU's have 758 million transistors, while modern GPU's have 3 billion transistors. An APU that could compete with a modern GPU would need to be more than 5 times larger than current CPUs, would have to be rated at over 300 watts, and would need a heatsink the size of a cinder block to keep it cool. The pointless monster of a chip would also cost in the neighborhood of $800. It's just not feasible. The netbook oriented version is oriented to be under 10 watts o_o. The desktop oriented version is oriented to be under 100 watts o_o. Maybe you should research a little more... xD AMD is planning to base the GPU portion of the chip on the Radeon series and the CPU portion of the chip on the Athlon II to Phenom II x64 CPUs. Thus, the transistor count is as high as any combination of current CPUs and GPUs. However, by placing the GPU and CPU on the same chip, AMD has reduced latency between the two units and lowered the power requirements for this APU. The APU is not about pure power and wattage, it's about efficiency. Apparently even 9-watt APUs can run modern games quite well. (This is comparable to Intel's 8.5 watt Atom processors). AMD plans for the quad-core version of their APUs to run at about 55-watts so who knows what an 100-watt APU may be capable of? I've done plenty of research. You, on the other hand, don't appear to have a very firm grasp of just what is, and is not, possible with this type of processor. What AMD is producing is a low-wattage CPU, with what is the rough equivalent of a Radeon HD5550 class GPU onboard. As I keep telling you, such a chip will not come anywhere close to matching the performance of high-end graphics cards like the HD5970 or the GeForce GTX480. Like I said before, it would take a chip with almost 4 billion transistors (With 3 billion of those dedicated to graphics) to match current high-end graphics cards. Such a monstrously large processor would need hundreds of watts of power, and put out an absurd amount of heat. For reference, Fusion CPU's are estimated to be closer to the 1.2 Billion transistor mark. A far-cry from high end GPU's of today. Yes, but you have to recognize that AMD Fusion's micro-architecture is completely different from any micro-architecture of today. Currently, increasing performance has been solely about doubling the number of transistors on a piece of silicon every 2 years. Placing the CPU and GPU side by side has its inherent advantages; all data moves within the chip without being sent to an internal bus, the CPU and GPU will be running on par with each other, the GPU will be able to access the cache, etc. These differences in micro-architecture alone are enough to compensate for the transistor count. Increasing performance is NOT based solely upon doubling the number of transistors on a given chip. More efficient instruction sets and faster buses are a major contributing factor as well. Yes, placing the CPU and GPU side-by-side does have advantages. The small number of GPU Stream Processors that AMD is going to include on these Fusion CPU's perform very efficiently. This DOES NOT make up for the difference in transistor count between the integrated GPU on a Fusion CPU, and a high-end graphics card like the HD5970 or the GTX480. The integrated GPU on Fusion CPU's performs about the same as an HD5550. That's roughly 32 times slower than an HD5970, and I'll tell you exactly why that's the case:
It is not up to par with highend GPU's, end of story. What part of this don't you understand? You seem to think that AMD Fusion will be similar to Intel's integrated graphics/GMA... This is not the case. AMD will base its Fusion processors off of discrete graphics cards. Intel's GMAs can only handle Windows Aero. AMD Fusion can handle modern games. When I say compete with high-end graphics cards, why do you suddenly try to compare AMD Fusion to the GTX480... You can't even compare any other graphics cards of today to the GTX480... Here's a reference list of what is considered a high-end GPU. Drawing a concrete comparison between AMD Fusion and current GPUs/CPUs is impossible. They're considered completely different microarchitectures. We will have to wait for benchmark tests before we can actually place AMD's APUs above or below certain GPUs/CPUs. Also, would you like to cite those specs please? Any released specs are most likely for the netbook-line of Fusion APUs, which is the only line that AMD has demonstrated publicly; This line is targeted at competing with Intel's Atom line of CPUs and if you're trying to compare an Atom/Netbook-level APU to top-end graphics.. I'd say that's not a fair comparison. Yes, I compared it to a top-end graphics card, because you quite clearly said you thought it would compete with top-end graphics cards. And I quote:
It simply will not be able to compete with anything I would consider "top-end." Yes, I realize it's quite different from most anything we have today as far as graphics processors go. That doesn't change the fact that you can't squeeze a 5970's worth of hardware on a CPU-size package. The specs will be lower, the performance will be lower. This I can assure you. Dual Channel DDR3 tops out at 30GB/s. The last high end card that had that little memory bandwidth was the GeForce FX 5950, and some people believe that even its GPU was bottle-necked by it. Note: This does not mean I don't believe it will perform admirably in modern games. It most likely will, but again, not nearly as well as a real top-end graphics card.
Not the netbook version that AMD has revealed and demonstrated. Yes, I know. The desktop targeted one has no chance of competing with top-end discreet graphics cards either. It's not technically feasible to make a CPU that large. Even if they did attempt to go for a GPU that fast on the CPU, you'd also need 8 times more memory lanes on the motherboard, and lots of small sticks of DDR3 in parallel, in order to muster up the massive amount of bandwidth a GPU that fast would require. That's a pointlessly expensive design.
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