With the impending arrival of the Intel Sandy Bridge processors and AMD Fusion APUs, questions naturally arose as to what will happen to the GPU market, and it seems that, and it seems that AMD sees a bright future for both types of chips.
Both Sandy Bridge and Fusion processors have graphics capabilities integrated directly into the CPU.
As such, they can provide both processing and video capabilities to a system, something especially useful to mobile computers, which could always use a higher level of integration.
Since such products were unveiled, speculations started to circulate about what a threat they may or may not be to the market of standalone graphics cards.
Now, a report made by
Digitimes states that not only can the two coexist, but they can even have a supposedly multiplying effect on each other in terms of marketability.
According to said report, it was AMD's Corporate Vice President for the Fusion Experience Program, Manju Hedge, that said this.
Apparently, the APU (accelerated processing unit) needs to take into account the whole system's computing when merging the CPU and GPU, so as to reach the best level of parallel computing capabilities.
As such, with GPUs being mainly focused on video rendering and more advanced feature support, they should be able to coexist very well with the new generation of processors.
The report also went a bit into the comparison between Intel's upcoming CPUs and AMD's Fusion parts.
Apparently, while the Sandy Bridge may or may not end up having the upper hand in terms of pure processing prowess, their graphics side of things will be at a disadvantage.
The main reason is that Fusion will feature support for DirectX 11, whereas Sandy Bridge only comes with DirectX 10.1.
Moving forward, AMD will keep investing in graphics technology research and development, so as to keep adding newer and better features to APUs.
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