The future of the all new AMD

Fusion

The question is where all this will lead to? The development has been named "Fusion", and can be seen as a similar project that has led to the development of the "Hammer" processors, now known as the Athlon 64. The project should lead to the development of CPU's with integrated GPU cores, and the first results of the project should surface at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009. It will take a while before we can actually see results of the cooperation.

The integration of a GPU into a CPU is quite a logical step, as over the years the co processors, MMX, SSE instructions and X86-64 instructions have all been added to the CPU core(s). Both manufacturers are now expanding the amount of cores in a processor, but there is a point where adding more core will no longer add more performance. The integration of other functions in to a multicore processor will add to the overall performance of the system, and therefore does make sense.