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AMD Fusion APU - Can play AvP in DX11
- Thread starter HeX
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Quad core CPU and a GPU all in one. Surely this is going to need a serious heatsink to keep it alive?
well thats the reason they had to wait for the 32nm process to make it. i guess we'll find out soon enough.
Because the i3 isn't a combined GPU and CPU, it is a separate CPU chip and a separate GPU chip but in a single package.
Look:
Totally separate.
The Fusion has both the GPU and the CPU and everything else all on a single chip.
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Ah cheers. So the main distinction is that one's on one die and the other is on two? That's more of an engineering difference than a game-changing difference! 
I realise that one's a quad core with good graphics and the other is pretty pants in comparison but surely from a programmer point of view the Intel solution will look similar to the AMD solution?
So what exactly are they 'first'-ing here? Having graphics on the same die? SoC companies have done this for years! Or is it that the GPU on the AMD solution supports GPU compute which is how they can call it an on-chip accelerator....? I read the press release but it still seems quite vague! :S
I realise that one's a quad core with good graphics and the other is pretty pants in comparison but surely from a programmer point of view the Intel solution will look similar to the AMD solution?
So what exactly are they 'first'-ing here? Having graphics on the same die? SoC companies have done this for years! Or is it that the GPU on the AMD solution supports GPU compute which is how they can call it an on-chip accelerator....? I read the press release but it still seems quite vague! :S
The Fusion shares parts of the uncore between the cpu and the gpu, so latency between the two is almost non existent, same goes for direct memory access from either. More to it than that, but basically Fusion is way (or should be) more efficient than how i3 does it.
i3 is really not any different to normal mobo IGP, just happens the GPU is on the chip package instead of in the Northbridge.
The one benefit i3 has over standard IGP is that the memory controller is actually part of the GPU, thus giving the GPU much lower memory latency and better bandwidth. This comes at a cost however, as now the CPU has higher latency vs other i5/i7 CPU's which have the memory controller on the CPU (not the GPU).
With Fusion, you get all of the benefits of having everything on one chip, and no disadvantages. In theory.
So its a much better design.
i3 is really not any different to normal mobo IGP, just happens the GPU is on the chip package instead of in the Northbridge.
The one benefit i3 has over standard IGP is that the memory controller is actually part of the GPU, thus giving the GPU much lower memory latency and better bandwidth. This comes at a cost however, as now the CPU has higher latency vs other i5/i7 CPU's which have the memory controller on the CPU (not the GPU).
With Fusion, you get all of the benefits of having everything on one chip, and no disadvantages. In theory.
So its a much better design.
I've been waiting for these chips to come out for a few years now,since Amd first start talking about putting the gpu in with the cpu it seems a obvious winner.
It's impressive they showed a DX11 game running,although not the best framrates but maybe thats something they can sort out with driver updates in the future.
I'd imagine it will use different driver updates than the normal amd gpu's?
It's impressive they showed a DX11 game running,although not the best framrates but maybe thats something they can sort out with driver updates in the future.
I'd imagine it will use different driver updates than the normal amd gpu's?
Nope, you need to write code in OpenCL/DirectCompute like with existing GPU's.
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Most probably. I'm guessing you would just go to the AMD site and choose Fusion rather than Radeon HD or whatever it's called.
Yeah that's what I mean - whether it's on the same die or shares the same memory controller or whatever is just an engineering issue. If the programming interface looks the same (ie it looks like a CPU and a GPU) then there's no difference.
From the man himself (in 2006 though)
"The Fusion-based processors, with the CPU and GPU integrated in a single architecture, should make the life of software programmers and application developers much easier, Rivas added."
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196603590
Well APU is just a term coined by AMD themselves for anything under the Fusion brand, it has absolutely no meaning outside of their own product lines. So it is the world's first APU by deafult, because they are the only ones who use the term.
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I didn't think Bulldozer had Fusion?