Tahir Khan

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There is a new breed of processor coming from AMD, a processor that integrates the CPU and GPU onto one die.

SeraphicSorcerer

Hopefully performance will be gained.

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Judas

there should be a performance gain..

inte's IGP on the intel i3 and i5's are rather impressive

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comp_ali

That is looking promising .

IvanV

I'm surprised by the number of the stream processors. 480 seems like a definite overkill that would drive the price way up as I'm guessing that the GPU part would be much larger than the CPU part, which is kind of silly since this strikes me as a solution for people who are probably not that into GPU performance. Even 240 is three times as many as on the low end discrete solution.

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Feed the porkers and don't touch the buttons!

Judas

take what you can get

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Gastrian

Where would you gain the most benefits from something like this? Would it be in day-to-day use as a HTPC a multimedia decoder/encoder (3D animation for example) or more in the science field?

I'm just wondering as having something like this on a X4 would generally price it outside of a basic HTPC system (I can get a dual core CPU and onboard graphics for half the price of an Phenom II X4 CPU)

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Current PC
Athlon XP 64 3200+ (S939)
2GB DDR RAM
128MB GeForce 6600GT
Windows 7 Beta/Win XP Pro

IvanV

Anything that includes performing the same operations on a vast amount of data (arrays, matrices), without complex branchings. Scientific calculations, image/video editing definitely... Probably database queries... particle and smoke effects in games (as demonstrated by PhysX technology). Those are the things that I can think of.

It could probably speed up rendering drastically, but, so far, rendering has always been done on the CPU to ensure 100% accurate results, as well as get effects GPUs were incapable of, but with this generation, it could be possible.

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Feed the porkers and don't touch the buttons!

Gastrian

That makes it sound like it would have made more sense for it to be an Opteron CPU as opposed to a Phenom II

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Current PC
Athlon XP 64 3200+ (S939)
2GB DDR RAM
128MB GeForce 6600GT
Windows 7 Beta/Win XP Pro

IvanV

Yes, it would make a lot of sense in various server environments. The thing is, though, that AMD desktop and server CPUs (as well as Intel's Core and Xeon processors) are more or less the same, apart from ECC memory support, as designing only one line of processors requires much less resources.

Still, as I said, it can be of benefit in games, as well as image and video editing and encoding, and games are by far the greatest consumers of desktop CPU time. The rest of the time, the CPUs are mostly idle anyway, so I suppose that this makes as much sense as any previous or current architecture.

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Feed the porkers and don't touch the buttons!

Gastrian

So exactly how do these work? Does the GPU work in the same way that you can use a GeForce240 as a PhysX/CUDA add in card for a Geforce 260 and that DX11 allows the CPU to offload to the GPU or is it a fully working GPU that wouldn't require anf IGP or dedicated GPU to play games. I'm assuming its no to the second option as that would still require a video output.

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Current PC
Athlon XP 64 3200+ (S939)
2GB DDR RAM
128MB GeForce 6600GT
Windows 7 Beta/Win XP Pro

IvanV

To my understanding, it's a fully functional GPU that does not require integrated or discrete graphics. With current AMD (and Nvidia) GPUs, you can run a GPGPU application such as Folding@Home and while doing that, it still outputs image to the monitor normally. I believe that Fusion will work in the same way, with only difference being that the CPU and the GPU will be physically on the same die and that we shall have more applications that will be capable of employing the power of the GPU.

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Feed the porkers and don't touch the buttons!

ET3D

On the front page, there's the text "Llano APU to sample First Quarter 2010". However, I couldn't find it on the news item page, which makes the article feel unrelated to its title, as it doesn't discuss the schedule at all.

ET3D

As for the number of stream processors, 240 stream processors that are in the 5xx0 family take less than 250 million transistors. That's about a third of the transistors in a Phenom II. So it's not too bad, and 480 processors makes things a little more balanced. What's really interesting to me is how they'd put the other 3D functions in, such as texture accesses, ROP's, etc. A lot of work will have to go to the memory controller.

ET3D

On the low end, though, adding 200 million transistors would have a significant impact on size (the Athlon II X4 is 300 million transistors, the X2 is 234m).