Fusion represented for AMD a good reason to justify its action of acquiring ATI. The acquisition proved to be an unhappy one: AMD went down to the red line with its finances, and the management of the company changed. Even so, Fusion is still far from what AMD would like to detail. Still, no secrets seem to last too long, as there are always "industry sources" willing to disclose info on new technologies, and, according to TG Daily, some of them said that Fusion might be introduced as a half-node chip.

The small island of Formosa, where contract manufacturer TSMC that will be producing Fusion CPUs is located, appears to have received quite a number of visits from AMD’s engineers in Dresden, Markham and Sunnyvale lately. It seems that both AMD and TSMC are busy on developing the production scenarios for the first CPU+GPU chip from the Sunnyvale company.

Shrike is said to be the code-name of the first Fusion processor. It will feature a dual-core Phenom CPU and an ATI RV800 GPU core. The original rumors on Shrike presented it as a combination of a dual-core Kuma CPU and a RV710-based graphics processor. It seems that the past few quarters allowed AMD to work on the integration of a RV800-based core into Fusion. The RV800 chips are expected to be DirectX 10.1 compliant and to provide more performance than just a 55 nm-40 nm dieshrink.

Shrike will first come as a 40 nm chip, but it is expected to transit to the 32 nm fabrication technology at the beginning of 2010, close to Intel's introduction of 32nm. The processor will fill the gap to the launch of the next-gen core code-named "Bulldozer". It seems that AMD plans to have the Bulldozer-based chip, code-named "Falcon", released on TSMC's 32nm SOI process, and not the 45nm which was originally announced.

If all goes well, we should see Fusion as the first half-node processor (between 45 and 32 nm) in a long time.