AMD: The Fusion APU Era Has Begun

Anyone else find her voice obnoxious?

So its announced but when can people buy them?

I also want to see some reviews on it and see it compared to Sandy Bridge based mobile parts, especially compared to Quick Sync and power usage. Hard to say its great without seeing it in action yet....

Just announce Bulldozer 8 cores already speeds, prices ...thats all I care about!

''The A-Series is designed for personal supercomputing featuring up to four x86 cores...''

I'm a little confused. Featuring only UP TO 4 cores? Is this not a step backwards as AMD already has 6 core Phenoms albeit an older architecture? Or do they mean the initial APUs at launch will feature up to 4 cores?

This isn't their high-end version, it isn't designed for super-high-end desktops, but more for cheaper, low-end low-power high-performance computing.

Bulldozer is designed to tackle the desktop market with 4, 8 and 16 cores in the future.

i heard Microsoft are might be using AMD fusion II 28nm for their next gen 2.0 consoles. Be interesting to see if they going to put in another dedicated GPU in the system too. However these Sandybridge and AMD fusion build in GPUs aren't powerfull to take on the higher end GPU on the market. I really hope Fusion 2 can be as powerful as a HD5870 specs or GTX580 specs or similar to the mobile version counterparts.

@schizofrog

if you been following you'll know that bulldozer will introduce AMD variant of hyper threading, so 4 physical cores equates to 8 virtual ones, this doesn't account for the GPU cores

@kcorp2003

It would be nice to see them at a 5870 Mobility level or 580M level but I don't see it happening since the temps would probably get very hot on the die. And in Laptops or notebooks it'd be especially hot since airflow is so poor.

Unfortunately for AMD, their new marketing language will prove to be useless since the new Sandy Bridge chips would be considered APUs too... (graphics on die)

Yea, so what I'm getting from this is that AMD just sh** a brick seeing what Sandybridge can do, and is pouring their hearts out on this thing. I'd hate to see them come up short...again.

Wrong .... bulldozer will have inside a single core two independent integer cluster, meaning that a 4 "core" bulldozer chip will look like and 8 threaded processor BUT unlike hyperthreading or SMT AMD is duplicating actual hardware inside the core.

1 SMT'd or HT'd core can never and will never be able to compete performance wise with a true dual core, or quad and so on and so forth (if the architecture is the same) This basically means that, if with HT or SMT u get very little return in performance for your money (look at the efficiency article from yesterday in Tom's) with AMDs approach the difference in performance should be considerable given that u actually have 8 "mini" cores. How fast can they process information, what's the power requirement ... these are things that will be reveal later on this year.

"all-day battery life and notebooks that stay cool all day are now possible with the new Fusion APU" - this is all I wish for a AMD proc coz mostly they are not like that.

this AMD Apu's consume 9 to 21w of power, sandy bridge
is out from this scheme

desktop chips sure, notebook chips - thats a different story

this "different" story is not yet written

So, I guess it's a good thing that these Fusion APU's are intended to compete with the Sandy Bridge processors that were announced this week....

I don't have where all that "oh the SB" comes from.
Exactly what did impress you?
Faster video encoding? Did you check the bloody quality drop, eh?

Sandy Bridge, pfff. They chose to change one thing on it and make it work well, Encoding. Other than that, its the same old joke IGP we've always received from Intel.

@SpadeM

Didn't say it was hyper threading, said it was their variation on it, and yes real cores always wins hands down

@fstrthnu

clearly you haven't been following closely enough, an APU is not simply a CPU and GPU bundled into a single die, it's the leveraging of the GPU stream/CUDA cores to aid with the completion of general purpose processing task, so far intel has only managed to produce one highly tailored application for video encoding, thats far from general purpose processing task, should intel find a use for quicksync outside of video encoding then i will happily redact my statement. The APU will allow AMD to take the value proposition to another level, augmenting a CPU with the under utilized power of the GPU to allow it to surpass the performance of a higher rated CPU, just throwing the CPU and GPU on a single die aint going get you there

Fusion are true on die APU , sandy bitch was just 2 die (CPU + cappy intel IGP) on 1 package .
just like the Athlon64 X2 was true native dual core and the Pentium D was just 2 die (crappy prescott) in 1 package .

ROFL, thats a funny one.




Nobody cares about that waste of transistor that is the integrated GPU. SB is all about the 32nm process and the OC headroom of the K models (read 5GHz).

Unfortunately that is probably not true. You can double check the chip design on Toms' new review article "http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833.html"

Hope that is useful

ok , i mix the Westmere with Sandy Bitch , sorry about that , but the Sandy Bitch still hv crappy IGP on die

Intel is beating AMD in every segment except the lowest end at the moment and there's no reason to believe that Bulldozer will change things much. If AMD had anything to brag about with Bulldozer, they'd at least be rolling out benchmarks and definite release dates.
I've been buying AMD since 1999, I got four Thubans last month but those are probably the last AMD CPUs I'll ever buy since there's no way they'll catch up to Intel before they go down.

So if I'm reading this right no APUs for the Desktop? Good.

@killerclick

It's in AMDs interest to keep the performance profile of bulldozer secret, if intel knew exactly how much they needed to beat AMD by they can easily tailor a product to kill AMDs offering, intel doesn't exactly release the best product they got at the lowest price they can offer, they're more of a lets see how much we can milk out of our customers kinda company

but it's more then obvious your very anti-AMD, even if you claim to have been buying AMD for the last decade or so, every single one of your recent comments with regards to AMD, as far as i can remember, has been with the single purpose of trashing them, your shorting AMD stocks or something?

But i might agree with you in regards to the CPU cores in the bulldozer may not be that spectacular, but then thats where their plans of utilizing the GPU stream cores to augment the CPU gets real interesting, that's a significant amount of untapped power there

Nonsense, it's in AMDs interest to stop people from upgrading to Sandy Bridge.






Huh? They're afraid of supplying samples, benchmarks and a firm release date because Intel might develop a new processor to kill them in four months? Intel has an established roadmap and all the decisions regarding the current product cycle have been made a long time ago. AMD has nothing to lose by providing more information about their upcoming products, the reason they're not doing that is they have nothing to brag about.






Any sane company is like that, including AMD. The reason AMD is offering their products at lower prices is because they have to.






Yes I am because they're screwing up. I want strong AMD and Intel at each others throat because that means better products at lower prices. I feel the same way about NVIDIA, I don't want any of them to go down because I don't want to pay monopolistic prices.





It's just dead silicon without software support. Where will I be able to use the GPU stream cores? Which applications? What are the release dates? I had a CUDA capable GPU since 2007 and it didn't make much difference in computer performance. The software developers are barely catching up with the number of cores available, how long will it take them to make use of the "APU" that will have a single digit market share?

For the Fusion's category, I think I would rather go with the ARM Tegra 2. But for the high end, I will wait for Bulldozer.

@KillerClick

actually keeping the specs to your product under wraps is a very good way to prevent the competitor catching up, especially if you believe your product can outperform the competitor, if intel knew that bulldozer will be twice as fast as current model Phenom they can easily postpone sandy bridge or retool sandy bridge to target those performance, in fact if they knew bulldozers ability they can easily just release a product to beat bulldozer by just enough and shelve the higher performance abilities for another release, do you really think that we seen the true potential of sandy bridge, intel no doubt have kept a little extra performance headroom just in case bulldozer lives up to it's hype, reality dictates that some secrecy is required to keep competition healthy

as for the APU, there is still way too much speculation to know for sure how AMD plans on implementing this and thats why i said interesting, i didn't say it was a sure fire dunk, but if AMD can pull off the APU trick with minimal software retooling then that would be entertaining to say the least, not being a hardware engineer i do not know how hard would it be to implement a hardware level offloading of mathematical task. In reality AMD does not need to win over the entire industry they only need Microsoft to create a library function, once thats done people will start to use it, especially if it gives your software a speed advantage, Microsoft after all coded a whole independent 64bit version of XP just for the Athlon 64, the beauty of such a system is you dont need to figure out multi-threading and such likes, you just dump a large batch of calculations into the library and tell it to do it's thing, look at SSE, SSE2 and 3DNOW (especially 3DNOW)

AMD is the one catching up. They're so far behind Intel it's not competition anymore.





Postopne? Retool? Are you serious? Sandy Bridge is already on the market, the specs were frozen a long time ago, release dates set, it's done, not like they can pop an extra couple of cores in there or suddenly get better yields. There is no reason for AMD to keep quiet unless they don't have anything good to show. If they did, they'd want as many people as possible to know about it to keep them from upgrading to Intel.





If it were that simple, GPGPU would've taken off years ago. CUDA was released in 2006, you also have Microsoft's DirectCompute and Open CL. None of them is exactly taking the world by storm. Also products using such technologies take years to develop (GPUs and CPUs are fundamentally different in many ways including they way you write programs for them) so even if Fusion/APU is a success it'll come way too late.

AMD has staked its future in something that may take a decade to realize (if it doesn't fail outright) and in the meantime Intel's entire lineup is beating them on price/performance and efficiency.

@killerclick

CUDA's failure is more to do with Nvidia's insistence on owning the technology rather then allowing for mass market adoption of an open standard, CUDA is a single vendor solution, similarly with DirectCompute which fragmented the market and stalled openCL, but good bets is if AMD throws their weight behind DirectCompute your going start to see some traction, the reason why GPGPU has not taken off is because intel has no vested interest in it, in fact they have very little IP in the area, it would also be disastrous for their CPU line

The beauty of a library function is you do not need to drastically rewrite your codes, you can plug all that into a wrapper and have the library handle it, look at directX, it's a wrapper for networking, input, sounds and graphics

so how many people do you think will upgrade between now and bulldozer's release? if they really needed to upgrade that much then i dont think AMD can stop them, are you going out to buy a sandybrdige CPU? it takes a while after a CPU is release before it goes mainstream (i.e. available in HP units in best buy). Heavens forbid should a vendor ever set a date for a product and miss that date...... you make it sound like just cause intel said it's good for that date that they do not have the digression to change that date

im not saying bulldozer is going be the bees knees or even a sandy bridge killer, but im not going to bury a company before seeing what they got to offer, but hey your probably right bulldozer is a weaker product cause AMD wont show you some benchies and you know sandybrdige is such a spectacular product that it's going take a miracle for anything to beat it