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AMD’s technical director of sales and marketing EMEA, Giuseppe Amato has given the clearest indication to date of the manufacturers plans for it’s upcoming platform, Fusion.
In the interview with HardwareUpgrade, Amato made clear that the company had not solidified its plans for the Fusion format, be did state that the rumour that the platform would only be available in single-chip flavours was false.
He also said in addition to the confirmation that it would be available in multi-chip format that the platform would likely be able to be linked together to allow for parallel GPUs through a CrossFire-like interface. He also said that the combined interface would also have a total thermal design power of less than 120 Watts.
When asked by HardwareUpgrade why the company was moving in the direction it is, he said: "AMD changed from a processor company to a platform company [when we bought ATI]." This is where Fusion ties in. Its high grade of flexibility will combine GPUs and CPUs into one product. Amato believes that Fusion platforms will be able to specifically match the needs of its customers."
He also explained a little bit more about the general ideas behind GPGPU (general purpose computing on graphical processing units), and how Fusion will take advantage of it. According to Amato, Fusion will work by splitting the work across the combined CPU and GPU.
Code that is more suited to being processed by a CPU will be sent to it, while code better ran on the GPU will be sent there. The idea is that by splitting the load and more efficiently handling the information, the Fusion can handle code more efficiently and therefore reduce the power required to do certain functions.
Amato also dispelled rumours that the manufacturer was moving towards a policy of going completely fabless. Blaming the rumour on a misinterpretation of a recent speech by AMD’s CEO, Hector Ruiz, he said that the company plans to stick to its current methods of production with only GPU and chipset production remaining fabless.