APUs

[Myboom]

Hey this is an interesting read. Its been posted almost 2 weeks ago but maybe some of you havent seen it.

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2010/08/06/amd-discrete-graphics-gpus-fusion-apu/

APUs scare me tbh. They are one step closer to consoles... lol

Cant believe PCI-E is a bottleneck! or will be in the near future

 

[UnUnOctium]

They won't merge them, not unless we have some breakthrough in microelectronic design. Sure you get a good bandwidth if you have them on the same die but then the TDP and other factors are immense. I say 'not until quantum computing'

 

[Myboom]

I like the idea of an APU and GPU working together.

 

[Myboom]

They won't merge them, not unless we have some breakthrough in microelectronic design. Sure you get a good bandwidth if you have them on the same die but then the TDP and other factors are immense. I say 'not until quantum computing'

According to this link APUs are very much possible already.

http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2010/06/01/a-fusion-apu-comes-to-life-at-computex/

 

[UnUnOctium]

According to this link APUs are very much possible already.

http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2010/06/01/a-fusion-apu-comes-to-life-at-computex/

Yes, but it's a weak prototype. I doubt they can put together a Radeon 5890 and a QX9770 for example. The interfaces are indeed the bottleneck, but there's a reason why we don't have merged 'APUs' as the norm since it's a trivial idea but the implementation is quite the opposite.

 

[Ancalagon]

I'd be very interested in seeing what they can do with APUs in terms of performance. I mean, if they can get a large enough GPU die in there, it could be a pretty potent system. It might need extra cache for a framebuffer, but it could be a very interesting development.

The problem is that it would affect your upgrade cycle, in that you would now need to upgrade CPU + GPU to upgrade the GPU, considering we dont often need to upgrade CPUs.