Date: 04/02/2011

AMD's Fusion chips ups PC computing performance by going vector

After a long gap AMD has surprised the PC users with semiconductor chips performing better than expected. The name Fusion itself is attractive and sound nice to call 'Fusion PC' or 'Fusion book'. Well, apart from the name what is the real power inside fusion chips.

Fusion packs both main processor and graphic processor in single package and more importantly adds Accelerated Processor Units (APUs), all in single die. As per AMD, the advantage of APU is "all the major system elements - x86 cores, vector (SIMD) engines, and a Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for HD decoding tasks - attach directly to the same high speed bus, and thus to the main system memory. This design concept eliminates one of the fundamental constraints that limits the performance of traditional integrated graphics controllers (IGPs)".

The new Fusion chips can do lot more complex processing algorithms in short time compared to it predecessors, mainly a huge improvement in human-machine interface handling. AMD calls "new vector-oriented, multi-threaded (100s of threads) data-parallel models."
Handles graphics, audio and video stream more smoothly. As usual AMD provide rich graphic capability for gaming folks.

AMD is assisting software application developers with new tools called DirectCompute and OpenCL to efficiently use the multi-core and multi-processor for fast running of software applications.

Fusion chips are clearly a more than Moore solutions, where the smart processing is achieved through efficient use of resources rather than counting on number of transistor or gates.

To learn more on AMD's vector computing stuff read the white paper at
http://sites.amd.com/us/Documents/48423B_fusion_whitepaper_WEB.pdf