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New AMD Fusion Demo Impresses

post #1 of 2
11/9/10 at 11:04am
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In case you haven't heard, next year is when Advanced Micro Devices (AMD to the rest of us) will finally release the Fusion processors it's been planning for the last 5 years or more. These Advanced Processing Units (APUs) combine central processors with graphics processors and enable higher and more flexible performance.

AMD showed a demo of what the netbook versions of its Fusion processors can do by having one run a program that maximizes CPU usage, a program that utilizes general purpose graphics computing, and a 1080p video stream all at once with no slowdowns or jitteriness. All told, it blows current Intel-powered netbooks out of the water. Now, if it can only get decent battery life...

You can see the demo video below or read the story at Engadget.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47JtQ...layer_embedded
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post #2 of 2
11/10/10 at 6:47pm

Apple on board as AMD Fusion partner?

When Apple decided to drop NVIDIA from its line-up of Mac desktops a few months ago, there was a certain amount of murmuring that the company could soon ditch Intel in favour of AMD's Fusion platform. While we won't know for sure until we hear it from the mouth of Steve Jobs, a brief slide slipped into an Analyst Day presentation has suddenly ignited this particular rumour all over again.

AMD CFO Emilio Ghilardi took to the stage and gave attendees a brief look at the range of products that partners would be bringing to the market. Tucked in among the likes of Sony and Lenovo was a slide proudly displaying a pair of iMacs alongside a Mac Pro desktop. Ghilardi didn't take the time to give any details, but did preface the presentation by saying that we should expect "products that you have never seen before from AMD".



Of course, the current generation Apple desktops are already using AMD video-cards, and it's entirely possible that the slides were referring to that.



On the other hand, the focus of the entire day was the upcoming Fusion platform, and the pairing would seem to make sense for the Mac-maker. The company has repeatedly decried Intel's underwhelming integrated GPUs and refuses to ship a system without some sort of discrete graphics chip.

But the fact that NVIDIA doesn't have a QPI license has been a minor headache for Apple, forcing it to use discrete GPUs instead of more efficient chipsets with integrated graphics. It's believed that this is why the smaller MacBooks and the MacBook Airs still use the older Core 2 CPUs paired with an NVIDIA chipset. However, the new APUs would give the graphics performance that Jobs demands while still keeping power usage and battery-life in check.

It's obviously impossible to tell if AMD and Apple have any surprises in store just yet, but at this point we wouldn't be surprised to hear of a growing relationship between the two companies in the future.

Full credit!

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