5 years since the announcement
AMD is reputedly saying that it can launch the Fusion chip this
year. Over the past five years Fusion meant just about anything in this
confused chip company, but for most geeks Fusion is a monolithic chip
that has CPU and GPU under the same hood.
This is exactly what Intel’s Westmere 32nm is going to be, just with a weaker graphics part and Intel didn’t ring all the bells about its
breakthrough chip that has GPU and CPU together. AMD has been doing
this since 2005 and its acquisition of ATI.
AMD hopes that many notebook manufacturers will have a wish to buy its
super chip, but this is yet to be seen. We would bet more money on
bulldozer as a more successful one, as AMD still has to take the TDP to
a much lower levels and close to gap to Intel in this market segment.
Intel has some 18W TPD notebook chips, with its mighty Core 2010 and
weak 45nm graphics, but the notebook performance of this chip is simply
overwhelming despite lackluster graphics.
AMD's Fusion has yet to prove its power and performance. It looked good
as an idea or a Power Point slide some five years ago. We can hope to
see some prototypes and maybe even buy one in late 2010.