AMD Fusion Details Leaked: 40/32 Nm, Dual-core CPU, RV800 Graphics

News
By Theo Valich
published

Taipei (Taiwan) - AMD pushed Fusion as one of the main reasons to justify its acquisition of ATI. Since then, AMD’s finances have changed colors and are now deep in the red, the top management has changed, and Fusion still isn’t anything AMD wants to discuss in detail. But there are always "industry sources" and these sources have told us that Fusion is likely to be introduced as a half-node chip.

It appears that AMD’s engineers in Dresden, Markham and Sunnyvale have been making lots of trips to little island of Formosa lately - the home of contract manufacturer TSMC, which will be producing Fusion CPUs. Our sources indicated that both companies are quite busy laying out the productions scenarios of AMD’s first CPU+GPU chip.

The first Fusion processor is code-named Shrike, which will, if our sources are right, consist of a

dual-core Phenom CPU and an ATI RV800 GPU core. This news is actually a big surprise, as Shrike was originally rumored to debut as a combination of a dual-core Kuma CPU and a RV710-based graphics unit. A few more quarters of development time gave AMD time to continue working on a low-end RV800-based core to be integrated with Fusion. RV800 chips will be DirectX 10.1 compliant and are expected to deliver a bit more than just a 55 nm-40 nm dieshrink.

While Shrike will debut as a 40 nm chip, the processor is scheduled to transition to 32 nm at the beginning of 2010 - not much later than Intel will introduce 32 nm - and serve as a stop-gap before the next-gen core, code-named "Bulldozer" arrives. The Bulldozer-based chip, code-named "Falcon", will debut with TSMC’s 32nm SOI process, instead of the originally planned 45 nm.

As Fusion is shaping up right, we should expect the chip be become the first half-node CPU (between 45 and 32 nm) in a very long time.

Theo Valich
15 Comments Comment from the forums
  • apache_lives
    i wonder if this core could add to crossfire, or do physics etc...
    Reply
  • jaragon13
    Ahh man,this would be awesome if it came out in 2009,and wow they are actually getting new technology! yay.
    Reply
  • hannibal
    Can be really good for living room movie computers. It's all depends on how much it eats power. For gaming it's too weak, but in anyway very promising, if the power usage is low enough!
    Reply
  • gaiden
    if it does get small enough and sips power all we needed then would be one of those nano-ITX board..! wow, im getting bumps, this is all very exciting! and who knows it may very well be part of your future LCD tv! that would save me the time for experiments :p
    Reply
  • BaronMatrix
    What's interesting to me is the fact that Radeon is still made on SiGe while Phenom is made on SOI. I wonder if they have qualified Radeon production on SOI which will make it easier to eventually go to GPU on-die. Also, interesting is the fact that it was said that AMD would make the first Fusion, but also that Fab36\38 wold concentrate on the high-end projects.

    And contrary to what one person says above, it depends on how many Stream units it has as to whether it will actually be good for gaming. The Phenom side can play games at 1024 as can the 3200 (not CrySis of course). This should be the 4200\4300 if it's RV800.
    Reply
  • falchard
    I have solved AMDs gap in Research and Development. They have an office in Sunnyvale. I wonder how many times Vampires, or the end of the world has stopped thier production. Its very innefficient.
    Reply
  • royalcrown
    boooring, if it's on a phenom...it's gonna suck a%% !
    Reply
  • hannibal
    Hmmm... In Phenom there is nothing wrong in architectural level. The bigger problem for AMD has been the production technology. Area where Intel has been far away for a guite long time.
    With Intel production technology Phenom would most propable have much better clock speeds. Now with this prosessor we talk about much smaller production node, so it's not easy to tell how good this is gonna be. It can be good, or not so good. I hope that this is good, because it really can be very good home theather chip! Two CPU cores and GPU in one piece. It has potential of being more than sum of it's components.
    You allso have to remember that all the components here have the same memory pool, so there is not separate memory for GPU.

    Predictions (IMHO method used ;-)
    Good parts: faster communication between CPU and GPU. Power reguirements (total). Small size (total)
    Bad: GPU use normal DDR memory, is it limiting factor is hard to say. It has not been done before (I supose). Many thing can go wrong. "Only" two CPU cores at this moment (Not big problem, because this is not gonna be highend speed monster? anyway)
    Reply
  • dreamer77dd
    well what if you added this chip with 4 graphics cards. it is not like it is an on board chip it is a cpu. i think they will make it function with other cards for work place, and home expreance so only need one chip for all reasons
    Reply
  • hannibal
    It's possible, but most propably the best part of fusion idea is gone. Two core phenom is ok now (if it does clock well enough), but if you want real gaming computer in the future you need more cores and disgrete GPU for a while. Nobody knows how Larrabee change that though...

    Fusion should be cheap, low power solution... 4 graphics cards eats that away :-)

    ps. If AMD can make it so that in 2D you could use fusion GPU and in 3D some other graphic card like in Nvidia solution, well maybe it would be useful even then.
    Reply