AMD is the first demonstration of its APU, Fusion

At Computex, AMD is the first time demonstrated a chip Fusion, which he said must embody the future of personal computing by combining CPU and GPU into a single unit, the APU for Accelerated Processing Unit. On this occasion, the manufacturer has confirmed the timetable that evokes the past two years: the first products equipped with a chip Fusion should be created in the first half of 2011.

Fusion, which hitherto had not been raised otherwise than as PowerPoint slides,, wants to memory architecture comprising a CPU and GPU into a single computing unit. The latter therefore combine the advantages of the CPU, designed to enchainer series of complex calculations (serial), to those of the GPU, especially good for parallel computing (simple operations, but must be repeated many times).

For now, two processors have been announced. On the one hand, Llano, who must come equipped standard computers, fixed or portable, and the other Ontario, netooks sent to market or why not, the touch pads.

After quickly showed a wafer Fusion processors, Rick Bergman, senior vice president in charge of the Product Group at AMD, has launched two demonstrations conducted from a machine with an Ontario: a sequence of Games Aliens Versus Predator after 2, directx 11, then a test of hardware acceleration performed within Internet Explorer 9. In itself, nothing really special ... except that we still speak of a chip dedicated to low-cost netbooks!

A year after introducing its first demo Dx11 AMD thus benefits from Computex to signal to the industry and the rest of the world the good progress of Project Fusion. To speed up, AMD has announced the launch of an investment fund, the "Merger Fund" through which he promises to financially support companies that develop tools taking advantage of the specificities of these future chips. It Manju Hedge, recently left home NVIDIA where he framed the work around CUDA, which will oversee.

The game is not yet fully played: that is genuinely running Fusion CPU and GPU together, it is necessary to develop new programming models taking into account the structural change.