Our friends over at TrustedReviews have got their sweaty mitts on some juicy information for AMD fans – leaked documents detailing the upcoming Fusion platform.
Quoting information published by TGDaily, TrustedReviews describes the first Fusion platform, currently codenamed 'Shrike', as a dual-core Phenom chip with a built-in ATI Radeon RV800 graphics engine. Aimed primarily at the notebook and low-power PC market, there's a lot to be said for integrating graphics into the processor – and it's something AMD has been planning on doing with its ATI acquisition from the start.
TGDaily has it that the Shrike chips will be manufactured under contract by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, one of AMD's partners. The rumour has it that the initial run will be smaller than the average at 40nm, with the transition being made to the more impressive 32nm some time in 2010.
Although the in-built RV800 GPU will be up to the task of playing back video and 3D rendering, don't expect to be playing the latest games – despite full DirectX 10.1 compliance, the chip is definitely sat at the low end of the marketplace with performance quite a bit lower than the earlier RV770-based Radeon 4870 boards. That said, the chip is clearly not designed for that kind of task – and if motherboard manufacturers want the option, the system will support discrete graphics over PCIe – possibly even with the on-the-fly switching we're starting to see in top-end notebooks.
As for when you'll be able to get your hands on a system built around the all-in-one chip, AMD is keeping shtum beyond earlier roadmaps pointing towards a 2009 release – but let's hope that this is the turnaround point for the beleaguered company.
Looking forward to having a system with the graphics and CPU integrated into a single chip, or is that crazy talk? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quoting information published by TGDaily, TrustedReviews describes the first Fusion platform, currently codenamed 'Shrike', as a dual-core Phenom chip with a built-in ATI Radeon RV800 graphics engine. Aimed primarily at the notebook and low-power PC market, there's a lot to be said for integrating graphics into the processor – and it's something AMD has been planning on doing with its ATI acquisition from the start.
TGDaily has it that the Shrike chips will be manufactured under contract by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, one of AMD's partners. The rumour has it that the initial run will be smaller than the average at 40nm, with the transition being made to the more impressive 32nm some time in 2010.
Although the in-built RV800 GPU will be up to the task of playing back video and 3D rendering, don't expect to be playing the latest games – despite full DirectX 10.1 compliance, the chip is definitely sat at the low end of the marketplace with performance quite a bit lower than the earlier RV770-based Radeon 4870 boards. That said, the chip is clearly not designed for that kind of task – and if motherboard manufacturers want the option, the system will support discrete graphics over PCIe – possibly even with the on-the-fly switching we're starting to see in top-end notebooks.
As for when you'll be able to get your hands on a system built around the all-in-one chip, AMD is keeping shtum beyond earlier roadmaps pointing towards a 2009 release – but let's hope that this is the turnaround point for the beleaguered company.
Looking forward to having a system with the graphics and CPU integrated into a single chip, or is that crazy talk? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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