Now AMD has completed the acquisition of ATI. This is what they plan to do:
CPU/GPU Silicon "Fusion" - Another Industry First for Customers AMD plans to create a new class of x86 processor that integrates the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level with a broad set of design initiatives collectively codenamed "Fusion."
It's quite amusing to see this actually going to happen... as I was talking to a friend about this a few months back ... jokingly.
The reason we have GPU today is due to the fact that CPU is just not powerful enough in the past to do 3D rendering - CPU is only general purpose. And graphics rendering needs have very specific requirement - floating point calculation. But the GPU today has become so powerful that sometime not all it's calculation power is fully utilized, if I remember it correctly ATI was going to use some of it's GPU power to do physics calculations.
The CPU on the other hand has came a long way as well. From the humble 486 to today's dual core! if you can put 2 or 4 cores into a processor, why not put in a GPU or 2. GPU was split from CPU, and now it's going back into CPU... On one hand, once GPU is fully integrated into CPU, we'll have more space on motherboard. But, on the other hand, we can no longer upgrade them seperately, but I guess it's OK for main stream computers - like those used in offices or in laptops.
Is this Fusion going to be yummy? We will see.
