I actually find the prospects of this exciting... Of course, that's provided that Fusion really does more than just duct-tape on a GPU core with a CPU. Rather, I'm hoping that AMD manages to integrated the GPU cores a bit into the CPU's own instruction pipeline, or at least give proper instruction set support so that CPUs can offload work to the stream processors.
If this actually does happen, what we're basically looking at is a version of
the Cell processor on crack, but in x86 flavor.
Another Xbit article mentions that a single Llano chip could have up to 480 stream processors; if the whole thing can run at 3 GHz and can work with existing x86 code to offload work to the stream processors, we're talking a jump from around 120 gigaflops for a 4-core Phenom to to 3 teraflops for a 4-core, 480-SP Fusion. Even if the SP run at 750MHz instead, it's still a jump up to 840 Gigaflops.
In other words, as a CPU, it'd curb-stomp even Intel's hexa-core i7s. And from AMD, it wouldn't be costing the same $1,000US price. As a result, I think it's definitely calling it too early to say that AMD has "given up" competing with Intel on the enthusiast front.
[citation][nom]DejaVuBoy[/nom]No doubt Nintendo will be looking at this for the Wii sequel...[/citation]
Microsoft and/or Sony may be taking a look, too. I have my doubts that, after massive profit losses on the PS3, anyone's gonna really try a $600US flagship that still costs more than that to produce. AFAIK, Sony STILL is at a loss in terms of the PS3 hardware overall, and their gamble hasn't pair off, due to their steady 3rd place in the market, and loss of so many exclusive franchises to the Xbox 360.
And at any rate, thanks to the wonders of Moore's law, even a lower-end modern chip beats the living hell out of what the much-vaunted best of the current crop of consoles offers: while the Xbox 360 boasts 288.0 gigaflops of math power, (96.0 CPU + 192.0 GPU) and the PS3 396.8 GFLOPs, (185.6 CPU + 211.2 GPU) The aforementioned Llano Fusion core, at 3.0 GHz, could offer anywhere from 840-3,000 GFLOPs, or nearly 8 times as much power.