AMD Fusion System Architecture Unifies CPUs and GPUs

[twitchyzero]

I was bored so I just searched up when the nVidia Kepler (GTX 600 series) and AMD Southern Islands (Radeon HD 7000 series) will be out just to give me a rough idea on how to start a new build in late Q3 and I came across this article

If you thought that AMD’s new A-Series CPU-and-GPU-on-a-chip (APU) was cool, hold on to your seats: the A-Series is just the first step in unifying CPU and GPU architectures in such a way that developers see just a single, multi-purpose processing unit. It’s called the Fusion System Architecture (FSA), and rather shockingly it will make its debut with AMD’s upcoming Southern Islands (Radeon HD 7000-series) graphics cards.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...-cpus-and-gpus

whattya think? I could see this keeping desktop build prices down but no overhead for OC

[ddr]

unless they are giving combination of CPU/GPU choices, users will most likely be forced to go with a i.e. high end CPU + high end GPU combo. What if I was only interested in a high end CPU? Maybe the price difference is negligible...

[SkinnyPupp]

Intel already did this with Clarkdale last year. What remains to be seen is whether AMD's desktop chips will include a graphics chip that is equivalent to what Sandy Bridge has now, or faster.

The laptop version is already out, it's called Llano. The Desktop part is called Bulldozer and will be out.. not very soon...

The Southern Islands changes that article talks about is more related to non-graphics capabilities of graphics cards. Even Intel has a graphics card now that does the same thing - except it doesn't even do graphics! I wrote about it a bit today here: Intel Knight’s Ferry Graphics Card