AMD's Fusion processor: first details

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith

Posted on 9 Feb 2010 at 16:59

AMD’s next processor architecture will combine four CPU cores and a GPU on a single 32nm die — but it won’t be launched until next year.

The architecture, dubbed Fusion, was revealed by AMD’s Sam Naffziger at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

The hybrid design has been in planning for several years under the name Fusion, but the architecture has now received the official codename Llano. AMD is calling it an APU, short for application processor unit.

The new hardware promises to be more sophisticated than Intel’s current Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, which combine a 32nm CPU die with a separate 45nm GPU die within the CPU package.

It will also support DirectX 11, while Intel’s current offerings are DirectX 10 only. The long wait for launch, however, will give Intel’s platform a significant head start.

Llano is expected to be particularly aimed at the mobile market. Each core is designed to draw as little as 2.5W in use (up to a maximum of 25W), and a new power optimisation system reflexively monitors processor activity to aggressively cut power from circuits that don’t require it.