Amd Fusion Apu's

[elitistlinuxuser]

A product that Amd has been working on for a while now. Amd fusion is designed the way many mobile CPU's in which you combine multiple components onto one chip called system-on-chips, Amd wants to bring that chip design philosophy to desktop pcs. The family of processors is called APUs or accelerated processing units. The chip combines an Amd processor with ATI Graphics. Lets say you were to go from a HP DV6 to HP DM1 well you compromise a lot of performance if you were to get a DM1, but you would get a smaller form factor. Part of What fusion will bring is a having a large amount of performance no matter how big or how small something is. Pretty soon graphics cards will disappear the way sounds cards did.
Here are some technical demonstrations
Here is a physical chip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0razbZBWe0
Html5 Graphics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dxIsRMvFZE
HD Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwhuNcx4BTY
Gaming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg5mKP5R8B8
Compared to Intel atom
http://liliputing.com/2010/11/amd-bobcat-chips-faster-than-a-speeding-atom.html
Information
http://sites.amd.com/us/fusion/apu/Pages/fusion.aspx
drivers are open source
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/amd-fusion-has-open-source-drivers-ready/
Compared to Core i5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJt1Uv151l4

 

[Exophase]

You have to be careful when referring to AMD's products here, because Fusion essentially applies to their entire product line (or will eventually), as opposed to being a particular CPU/GPU design. They're going to be shipping the Brazos platform first (Ontario/Zacate APUs), but Llano APUs are forthcoming next year. And the two are very different.

For what it's worth, Intel has basically been doing the same thing already with the Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs. They didn't get a lot of attention for it because the graphics weren't very good, but word is that the integrated graphics on Sandy Bridge is actually getting a lto better, or at least good enough to match Zacate if still well behind Llano.

Of course, ARM SoCs have been doing this for ages now.

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

You have to be careful when referring to AMD's products here, because Fusion essentially applies to their entire product line (or will eventually), as opposed to being a particular CPU/GPU design. They're going to be shipping the Brazos platform first (Ontario/Zacate APUs), but Llano APUs are forthcoming next year. And the two are very different.

For what it's worth, Intel has basically been doing the same thing already with the Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs. They didn't get a lot of attention for it because the graphics weren't very good, but word is that the integrated graphics on Sandy Bridge is actually getting a lto better, or at least good enough to match Zacate if still well behind Llano.

Of course, ARM SoCs have been doing this for ages now.

Of course its been done before, but there is a difference between doing something and doing something well. Amd managed to pack enough graphics performance to run high end applications like games, photoshop etc. This is pretty amazing considering it integrated graphics from a system-on-chip. Graphics cards will become unnecessary for running high end applications the way sound cards became unnecessary for high end applications.

 

[Exophase]

You most certainly don't need a high end graphics card to run Photoshop. Most games will probably do fine on the lower end APU graphics on both Brazos and Sandy Bridge. Llano won't be out for another half a year..

Sound cards really just didn't need to scale high enough to be worth keeping discrete. GPUs will benefit from extreme scaling for a while yet. You won't see anyone try to put the 300W monsters being sold at the highest end on a CPU die.

 

[Elanzer]

Of course its been done before, but there is a difference between doing something and doing something well. Amd managed to pack enough graphics performance to run high end applications like games, photoshop etc. This is pretty amazing considering it integrated graphics from a system-on-chip. Graphics cards will become unnecessary for running high end applications the way sound cards became unnecessary for high end applications.

It's still very weak in comparison to an actual GPU, and definitely won't do away with them anytime soon.

These APUs won't allow you to do anything that you couldn't already do with the HD 3200/4200 IGPs on modern AMD chipsets, it'll play games faster than said IGPs but double of "next to nothing" is still "next to nothing". It still doesn't change the fact that you need a discrete card to properly play any games at all, a $180 AMD HD 6850 desktop GPU is well over 30 times faster than the Brazos APU for games, and a $80 HD 4850 is still atleast 15 times faster. In all benchmarks we've seen so far, some modern games even on lowest settings possible on low resolution only run at ~20fps which is nearly unplayable. Most workstation oriented stuff like Photoshop never even used the GPU in any specific matter either, so there's virtually zilch for improvements there.

While it's nice that we're making improvements in GPU power for notebooks/netbooks without compromises in power usage, these APUs are still slower than discrete video cards released over 6 years ago.

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

Of course its been done before, but there is a difference between doing something and doing something well. Amd managed to pack enough graphics performance to run high end applications like games, photoshop etc. This is pretty amazing considering it integrated graphics from a system-on-chip. Graphics cards will become unnecessary for running high end applications the way sound cards became unnecessary for high end applications.

It's still very weak in comparison to an actual GPU, and definitely won't do away with them anytime soon.

These APUs won't allow you to do anything that you couldn't already do with the HD 3200/4200 IGPs on modern AMD chipsets, it'll play games faster than said IGPs but double of "next to nothing" is still "next to nothing". It still doesn't change the fact that you need a discrete card to properly play any games at all, a $180 AMD HD 6850 desktop GPU is well over 30 times faster than the Brazos APU for games, and a $80 HD 4850 is still atleast 15 times faster. In all benchmarks we've seen so far, some modern games even on lowest settings possible on low resolution only run at ~20fps which is nearly unplayable. Most workstation oriented stuff like Photoshop never even used the GPU in any specific matter either, so there's virtually zilch for improvements there.

While it's nice that we're making improvements in GPU power for notebooks/netbooks without compromises in power usage, these APUs are still slower than discrete video cards released over 6 years ago.

Well I guess I was wrong about the Photoshop, but it does help with other high end applications like video editing and such. Anyways the Amd Fusion APU's are not themselves GPU Killers, but they are the first step to get rid of dedicated
graphics cards. While the performance may not be as good as a dedicated graphics card, it is still good enough to run many modern Directx 11 and Opengl 4 games. Soon graphics performance of the Amd Fusion APU's will be good enough and dedicated graphics cards will become things for enthusiasts and become unnecessary for things like games and other graphics intensive tasks.

 

[Exophase]

It's still very weak in comparison to an actual GPU, and definitely won't do away with them anytime soon.

These APUs won't allow you to do anything that you couldn't already do with the HD 3200/4200 IGPs on modern AMD chipsets, it'll play games faster than said IGPs but double of "next to nothing" is still "next to nothing". It still doesn't change the fact that you need a discrete card to properly play any games at all, a $180 AMD HD 6850 desktop GPU is well over 30 times faster than the Brazos APU for games, and a $80 HD 4850 is still atleast 15 times faster. In all benchmarks we've seen so far, some modern games even on lowest settings possible on low resolution only run at ~20fps which is nearly unplayable. Most workstation oriented stuff like Photoshop never even used the GPU in any specific matter either, so there's virtually zilch for improvements there.

While it's nice that we're making improvements in GPU power for notebooks/netbooks without compromises in power usage, these APUs are still slower than discrete video cards released over 6 years ago.

The on-die GPUs are much more powerful than current IGPs. CPUs are usually made on much more modern processes than south bridge chipsets, so moving GPUs onto the CPU allows you to leverage a much higher transistor budget and higher frequencies (in fact, CPU processes move faster than discrete GPU ones). It also allows leverage of sharing high speed cache with the CPU, like in the case of Sandy Bridge, which is useful both for GPU storage and fast communication between the two. The latter will be bigger for compute purposes, greatly reducing latency. The flip side is that bandwidth is more strained since it's shared with the CPU and optimized for the CPU.

It's not very meaningful to compare Zacate's GPU with discrete GPUs that cost several times more than the entire APU, because it's a totally different market. Llano's GPU is much more powerful. Still, Zacate's more than enough to play most games reasonably, as reviews have shown - it's a big step beyond current Intel graphics, any IGPs, and most of all Atom (especially GMA600). It's a huge leap to go from "some games only play at 20fps" to "all games are unplayable." Most games play fairly nicely if at 30+fps, and 20fps tends to be tolerable. Bear in mind a lot of games on Zacate are actually CPU limited. If you want a reasonable comparison look at reviews for AMD HD 5450; Zacate performs a bit below, while Sandy Bridge GPU performs better.

Anyway, look at Llano sometime, which has 480 shaders instead of Zacate's 80 and will be aiming straight at the mid-range of graphics capability. It'll also be able to crossfire heterogeneously with a discrete if you do need to add more power. It'll be more than enough for acceptable performance in most games on the desktop.

The thing AMD is banking on most here is that GPU compute will really take off and people will start dumping data level parallel tasks on their shader arrays, because that's the biggest thing that's going to make the APUs seem viable. At the very least, GPU accelerated browsers will help. They won't sell these things just for games, especially not in the netbook sector.

 

[second exodous]

It will be interesting what these are actually like when they come out. I like AMD and usually get their products because I build my own systems and if this is meant to compete with the Atom CPU then it kind of worries me. I hate the Atom chip, hate hate hate it, hate mine and even know people that bought ion versions and hate those. Atom is a crime committed against consumers, x86 is NOT low power consumption, at least low powered x86 can not give anywhere near a modern desktop experience yet. In a few years maybe with a stripped down OS you can browse the web if the web hasn't gotten any more CPU intensive that is.

Also, integrating CPU and GPU can only really be done by AMD as they own both the CPU side and own ATi for the GPU side. I don't know, time will tell, but it has to be a LOT better than Atom for me to even consider buying one if that is where this APU is aimed.