Given that AMD spun off its now-beleaguered fabrication division and has been cutting ties with them, this means that they won't be manufacturing their own memory; they'll be putting their brand sticker on somebody else's.
This is really just an easy win for them: they really have no real cost or risk involved, and get a payout for what essentially amounts to royalty/licensing fees. Of course, given the low price of RAM, this likely won't be much money. I don't forsee it growing too much either, since demand is kept low (partly due to the continued existence of so many 32-bit programs even on 64-bot OSes) to where memory module size is outstripping most users' need for the capacity. (a cheap pair of 4GB DIMMs will last a couple years for a high-end gamer, easily)
I'd guess the biggest gain AMD sees here is possibly trying to consolidate their branding, in hopes that it could bulk up their volume by creating a stronger "brand image," with higher "customer loyalty," and other intangibles like that. It could work, or it couldn't. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
[citation][nom]lashabane[/nom]2) Who's going to sue AMD for this?.[/citation]
As I recall, Rambus actually finally just lost their lawsuit, after a decade or so in the making... And RAM prices are so ridiculously low, and HDD prices so high, no one would even get the IMPRESSION that there's price-fixing going on. (I recall when people acused AMD and nVidia of price-fixing graphics cards... Right around the time the GTX 280 was being slashed to compete with the 4800 series) So perhaps we've seen the end of RAM-related lawsuits for a while.
[citation][nom]iamtheking123[/nom]No. The reason Llano's graphics suck is because it has to use the system bus to GET to the RAM. It has nothing to do with the RAM speed itself.[/citation]
This is factually incorrect. Because the GPU is integrated with the CPU and memory controller, the only interfaces it has to deal with is the CPU bus (NOT the system bus) which is integrated with the memory controller anyway... And then, of course, the interface between the memory controller and the RAM.
And if you'd bothered to have read the benchmarking of Llano, you'd see that there's a close-to-100% correlation between in-game framerate and the available memory bandwidth. (really only adjusted due to RAM timings) So it's abundantly clear that memory performance is critical for performance with AMD Fusion; such a correlation is stronger than, say, even GPU scaling when using a discrete graphics card, which really says something.
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