Hi superbill,
thanx for the article, some of it I'd read in different articles and some of it was new to me.. It sounds very interesting and I have to admit I've read the same sort of stuff written about the 'Bulldozer' chip for AMD. These fusion chips, will as you've mentioned, have 8-16 cores although I don't think they'll do 16 cores until they reach 32nm node. Intels idea for the onboard memory controller sounds in theory great although the proof will be in the pudding as they say. It must be a real thorn in Intels side with AMD having sorted that particular problem of chip design so early. I'm not sure they will be able to get rid of all that cache though, as memory continues to get faster and faster information getting fed to the chip is already getting huge it's got to be stored somewhere before the chip can deal with it. I know they're getting better at prediction but thats only with certain software either way the future looks bright..
Here's a small section from an interview with AMD currently on the web pages of Tomshardware:
Tom’s Hardware: Unlike the competition, AMD equipped its integrated graphics solutions with HD video / H.264 support early on. The 690G chipset already offered hardware acceleration and decoding for HD content from HD-DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. AMD’s new 780G chipset, which we already tested in our article
AMD 780G Chipset- Full-HD Playback with a Sempron and found to be quite the impressive product, goes a step further. What’s next?
Polster: That would definitely be the integration of a CPU, chipset and graphics processor in a single chip, a project we call Fusion. However, this is still a few product generations away.
The full interview is here:
Triple Core in Stores this April : [CeBIT 2008] – Interview with AMD