AMD: The Fusion APU Era Has Begun

[exfileme]

AMD says that big experiences, sleek designs, all-day battery life and notebooks that stay cool all day are now possible with the new Fusion APU.

AMD: The Fusion APU Era Has Begun : Read more

 

[scytherswings]

Anyone else find her voice obnoxious?

 

[jimmysmitty]

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....

 

[SchizoFrog]

''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?

 

[joytech22]

[citation][nom]schizofrog[/nom]''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?[/citation]

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.

 

[kcorp2003]

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.

 

[Guest]

@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

 

[aznshinobi]

@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.

 

[fstrthnu]

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)

 

[stingstang]

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.

 

[SpadeM]

[citation][nom]hyperThreadings[/nom]@schizofrogif 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[/citation]

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.

 

[dEAne]

"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.

 

[sohei]

[citation][nom]fstrthnu[/nom]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)[/citation]

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

 

[apache_lives]

[citation][nom]sohei[/nom]this AMD Apu's consume 9 to 21w of power, sandy bridgeis out from this scheme[/citation]

desktop chips sure, notebook chips - thats a different story

 

[sohei]

[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]desktop chips sure, notebook chips - thats a different story[/citation]


this "different" story is not yet written

 

[sykozis]

[citation][nom]fstrthnu[/nom]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)[/citation]

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....

 

[kartu]

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?

 

[sandmanwn]

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.

 

[Guest]

@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

 

[sonofliberty08]

[citation][nom]fstrthnu[/nom]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)[/citation]
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 .

 

[tommysch]

"We believe that AMD Fusion processors are, quite simply, the greatest advancement in processing since the introduction of the x86 architecture more than forty years ago,"

ROFL, thats a funny one.

[citation][nom]kartu[/nom]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?[/citation]

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).

 

[pharge]

[citation][nom]sonofliberty08[/nom]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 .[/citation]
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

 

[sonofliberty08]

[citation][nom]pharge[/nom]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[/citation]
ok , i mix the Westmere with Sandy Bitch , sorry about that , but the Sandy Bitch still hv crappy IGP on die

 

[killerclick]

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.

 

[whooleo]

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