AMD’s John Freuhe posts his perspective on bring AMD’s Fusion technology — that merging of GPU capabilities with the CPU on a single package. At first blush this seems like an unvarnished good idea, especially for HPC: pulling out the PCI-e bottleneck between the CPU and the GPU will make GPU acceleration much more relevant to a wider variety of applications. But it takes a lot of silicon to do what NVIDIA and ATI are doing today on their chips, and merging CPUs and GPUs will not be a matter of simply gluing the together. There will be tradeoffs in things like capabilities and power budgets between the two, with the potential for different chip personalities for system builders to select from
The only company publicly working on fielding something right now is AMD with their Fusion architecture, and that is only targeted at consumers right now. Everyone in the high end community wants to know when the other shoe will drop. From the tone of Freuhe’s post, it won’t be soon…
