AMD Finally Shows Fusion, its Accelerated Processing Unit

 Four years after buying graphics chipmaker ATI, AMD shows the goods at Computex: called Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), these new chips which merge CPU and GPU are supposed to save power and cost (according to AMD) although it doesn't seem to us like they would generate any groundbreaking savings on both counts. A few months ago, Intel has shown that it too had embedded a graphics chip to a CPU.
That said, AMD's Fusion is superior to Intel's CPU/GPU hybrid graphics, and APUs are able to also perform general purpose computing to help the main processor, if apps support it - not all CPU/GPU hybrid are created equal. It would be a *real* game changer if developers were starting to rely on having another set of processing units inside every AMD processors (I suspect that AMD will pay select devs to do it…). For that, the APUs need to support DirectCompute and/or OpenCL, two standards that Intel's graphics solution doesn't support now. 

Before you get too excited, don't forget that APUs are “just” integrated graphics, even if AMD tries really hard to make them cool. They embed much fewer sub-processors than their “add-on” counterparts, and therefore the raw power is much less. We'll have to wait for the details and independent numbers before deciding if this is going to be useful in the short-term. (photo courtesy of Trusted Reviews)

Llano will go up against Sandy Bridge, which seems to have been pushed back to 2011 for volume availability according to Intel’s internal roadmaps. While Sandy Bridge will have graphics on-die, it will still only be DX10 class - AMD will have the feature-set advantage as far as graphics is concerned.

With Nehalem Intel introduced power gating, a technique that allows a core to be near-completely powered down minimizing leakage current when inactive. This not only reduces idle power but it also enables Intel to use extra TDP to turbo up active cores.

Final Words

Llano will obviously require a new socket. All AMD is saying is that OEMs will be shipping systems in 2011. It’s unclear if we’ll see anything in the channel before then, but with sampling in the coming months it appears that AMD could be ready for Sandy Bridge when it arrives next year.
AMD isn’t qualifying its 2011 statement with an indication of what quarter to expect systems. Given that the first samples are going out now, I’d expect to see Llano sometime in the first half of 2011 but that’s purely conjecture on my part. Sandy Bridge is scheduled to ship in volume in the first quarter of 2011.