AMD has some great stuff in the works I can't wait to see that take off and 2008 looks like a promising year too with all their scheduled plans. At first when I read what "Fusion" was, I had a slight doubt.
Then they claim, "Enthusiasts needn't worry, though: AMD says it doesn't plan to integrate high-end GPUs and CPUs into massive silicon fireballs, because both production costs and power envelopes for such chips would be too high." So that's a sigh of relief.
AMD maps out path to HT 3, DDR 3, DirectX 10:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/15/amd_desktop_roadmap/
AMD yesterday spilled the beans on its processor plans for the next two years, at a stroke confirming much of the info that has leaked out of the company and onto the web this year. On the desktop, the future is HyperTransport 3 and DDR 3. Chipsets will not shift to DirectX 10 until late 2007.
The key transition point, however, will come mid-2007. AMD has already said that's when its quad-core desktop CPUs will debut alongside new dual-care chips that, like the quadies, used HyperTransport 3 and incorporate Level 3 cache shared between the cores - 2MB of it, according to past leaks.
These two processor families - quad-core and dual-core - are believed to be codenamed 'Agena' and 'Kuma', respectively. The names 'Altair' and 'Antares' have also been mentioned in connection with these chips.
Both will support DDR 2, but DDR 3 support won't arrive - officially, at any rate - until mid-2008, when AMD introduces new single-, dual- and quad-core parts. Even then, there will be plenty of DDR 2 systems around, the roadmap suggests.
Single-core versions of Agena and Kuma - believed to be codenamed 'Spica' - will debut in Q4 2007, according to AMD's public roadmap.
Mid-2007 will see AMD's CrossFire chipset family migrate to HyperTransport 3 and PCI Express 2, followed some six months later or so by its integrated chipset line, which will also gain DirectX 10 support. ®
On to AMD's Brisbane core that was just released:
When Intel launched its Core 2 line of processors we saw AMD's performance and power advantages vanish into thin air but the comparison, at least on the power side, wasn't totally fair. Intel had been shipping desktop processors on its 65nm process for months prior to the launch of Core 2, while AMD's Athlon 64 X2s were still built on a 90nm process.
AMD just introduced and announced shipment of its first 65nm cores: codenamed Brisbane. Availability is another story entirely, as it's looking like we won't see any real quantities of these things until Q1 2007. Right now AMD's Brisbane chips are strictly OEM only and AMD wasn't able to give us an indication of when to expect retail/channel availability. Of course we wouldn't be talking about this today if we didn't have a chip, which we do, but for all intents and purposes you can consider this a preview of what to expect in the new year from AMD's first 65nm chips.
As you can expect, AMD is pricing the 65nm chips in line with its 90nm offerings to encourage the transition. Die size and TDP have both gone down to 126 mm^2 and 65W across the line. As AMD improves its 65nm SOI process you can expect to see even lower wattage parts, but for now all of the 65nm chips are rated at 65W TDP.
Transistor count remains unchanged at 154M as there is no new functionality or cache introduced with the move to 65nm. Once again, we will have to wait until around the middle of 2007 before we'll see any major changes to AMD's architecture.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2889&p=1