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To: wvbuild 06 who wrote (265553)	1/3/2011 2:59:20 PM
From: wvbuild 06	Respond to of 275872

The Lifer: Will 2011’s Macs Have AMD Inside? As the new year begins, it’s time to speculate in earnest on the hardware changes that Apple will introduce next, so Rik Myslewski is tackling this whopper… Although I’m writing this as December dawns, when you’re reading it I’ll be in Las Vegas at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, poking and prodding the promised plethora of computing goodness powered by AMD’s new Fusion line of processors. One company that won’t be demonstrating AMD-powered wares at CES is Apple—all Macs are currently powered by Intel processors. But that doesn’t mean that Jobs & Co. aren’t contemplating putting AMD under the hood of some future bit of shiny-shiny. In fact, they’d be crazy not to. A bit of background. Soon after AMD acquired graphics chipmaker ATI in mid-2006, the combined company announced a future chip line that would integrate AMD’s central processing units (CPUs) with ATI’s graphics processing units (GPUs) onto the same chunk of silicon. This CPU/GPU mashup was branded Fusion and was scheduled to appear in late 2008 or early 2009. In the time-honored tradition of “better late than never,” the first Fusion chips shipped on November 9, 2010. Well before that debut, AMD had dubbed them “APUs,” which stands for “accelerated processing unit” and is not an homage to a certain workaholic Kwik-E-Mart franchisee with the last name of Nahasapeemapetilon. Intel is readying its own CPU/GPU fusion—lowercase “f”—in its upcoming processor microarchitecture codenamed “Sandy Bridge.” This new line, officially and verbosely known as Second Generation Intel Core Processors, was unveiled at Intel’s developer shindig last September, and more details will be released in Las Vegas in January. So, if Intel is also about to release a combo chip, why should Apple be interested in talking with AMD about its Fusion chippery? The simplest answer is three letters: ATI. Intel claims that the graphics performance in its Sandy Bridge chips will be far superior to that of its previous graphics efforts, but that’s not saying one heck of a lot—far superior to “lousy” might vault their performance all the way to “mediocre.” ATI engineers, however, have been deep in the GPU weeds for years. As one AMD chip architect said at a recent company event, “We have 10 or 15 years of experience and knowledge in GPU design.” He also predicted that Intel has “some lessons to learn” about swiftly moving data in and out of graphics memory—lessons that have resulted in educational but painful “scar tissue” for his team. And then there’s the more mundane matter of price. A top-of-the-line AMD Phenom II X6 Black 1090T desktop CPU can be found at retail in the mid-$200 range. An Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, on the other hand, runs a cool $999 in lots of 1,000. Not a direct apples-to-apples comparison, to be sure—but you see what I’m getting at. And speaking of apples, Apple is rumored to have been in clandestine discussions with AMD about its Fusion line for some months now. Word on the street is that the talks have focused on the lower end of Apple’s oeuvre—think MacBooks and minis. Which makes sense: the two just-shipped Fusion APUs are aimed squarely at that segment: “Zacate” is an 18-watt part, and “Ontario” is its 9-watt little brother (they’re still known by their codenames). Both will be available in both dual- and single-core versions. Zacate and Ontario are built around AMD’s new low-power “Bobcat” compute core. Due later in 2011, however, is a more powerful desktop and server core, “Bulldozer,” which will also find its way into the Fusion family. Neither Apple nor AMD, of course, will talk about any plans they might have. The secrecy is so tight that when I asked one AMD rep about talks with Cupertino, he said, “Apple? I’m not even allowed to talk about the pie!” -- Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac\|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk. maclife.com

To: wvbuild 06 who wrote (265553)	1/3/2011 3:32:58 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Surprised no one posted here some excerpts from the MAXIMUM PC lab tests of AMD's Fusion chips. This came out almost 2 months ago Fusion is AMD's Atom Smasher Posted 11/08/10 at 10:07:42 PM by Gordon Mah Ung They won’t set the world on fire but Fusion should out gun equivalent Atom parts. But let’s be clear, Fusion is not about the x86 performance. It’s about graphics. That’s where AMD put the money shot in its first Fusion chip. With its third-generation unified video decoder core and support for H.264, DivX, Xvid, DX11 capability and 80 “nano-cores,” the first Fusion chips will have roughly the graphics performance of a Radeon HD 5450. The memory controller in the platform is a single-channel memory controller capable of supporting 8GB of DDR3/1066 RAM. That may not seem like much to a person used to Radeon HD 5970’s, but remember, we’re talking about a mobile chip that is incredibly tiny. The x86 cores and GPU along with the integrated memory controller, integrated PCI-E and other platform interfaces measures at roughly 75mm2 on TSMC’s 40nm process technology. Intel’s current D-series of Atom’s measure out at 87mm2 on the company’s 45nm process technology. Two sets of PCI-E interfaces are available: Four PCI-E 1.0 lanes off the APU and another four off of the Hudson southbridge. Anyone who has ever used an Atom – even the current generation Atoms, can attest to the chip’s sluggish performance. And that’s at x86. Toggle over to anything graphics related on an Atom and the space time continuum will literally start running backwards because it’s that slow. To be fair to Atom, Intel’s graphics have always acted more like anti-accelerators. That’s not so with Fusion. We’re prohibited from disclosing raw numbers right now but we can say that it’s no Atom or even Arrandale in graphics performance. You can actually play some fairly modern games – if you’re open to dropping the resolution a bit. maximumpc.com They go on to say that COD Modern Warfare 2 is even playable at typical low-end notebook resolution of 1280x768. Looks to me that Intel will need far-more-expensive Sandy Bridge >200mm chips or discrete graphics to compete with the 75mm Fusion in notebooks. And AMD will take a major share of the sub $600 market. Petz