AMD and ATI merger Deal. CPU/GPU Integration

The AMD/ATI merger has gone through today and they’re both pretty excited by it.

We went along to a press conference with guest speakers Bob Drebin – now AMD’s CTO for their new Graphics Product Group and Phil Mester – AMD’s Technology CTO.

Outlined were details of AMD’s future technologies. Chief in their plans was “Fusion”. Fusion is AMD’s vision of integrated GPU on the CPU. Married together with ATI’s excellent HyperTransport bus this looks promising indeed for the future of AMD. 3GHz GPU’s with 48 pipes were mentioned, but this may just be a pipe-dream (oh dear).

First impressions were of excitement and then…well concentration as AMD layed out several architectures with differering amount of GPU/CPU cores, HyperTransport buses and L2 or L3 cache.

Alongside “Fusion” was “Torrenza” – AMD’s open innovation platform allowing development of Fusion as well as a host of other specialised processing units.

This is all pretty exciting for the future and expect a full writeup very soon. I was a bit non-plussed about their near future plans though which appeared pretty vague, aside from the mention of native quad core and a passing mention from someone about “exciting products” coming soon.

As I said…more later but I’ll leave you with a quick image of a pretty neat handheld development unit (about the size of a PSP) that was rendering some very sexy looking tech demo’s in real time (not video’s as someone present asked – Ed) – tomorrow’s mobile phone technology.

 

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