Larrabee "like a GPU from 2006"

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith in San Jose

Posted on 23 Aug 2008 at 18:03

"We're forward-looking. And sometimes, when someone's forward-looking, they get a little bit ahead of the game. And that's kind of where we are."

Fusion a flop?

Montrym also scorned AMD's forthcoming Fusion platform, which will combine a GPU and a CPU on one die.

"Joining both components on the same die doesn't buy you that much," he commented. "It's not like there's a real bottleneck there. And every square millimeter you add to the die is a very expensive millimeter. It's an incremental expense, not a linear function. It's cheaper to separate them."

Andy Keane doubted whether buyers would even care about Fusion. "The class of buyer who buys that type of graphics isn't really buying graphics," he argued. "They don't care about it."

"You're working out what you can really afford to put on a CPU, and you're selling it to a customer who doesn't care. The economics don't make sense."