14 DAY TRIAL // Giuseppe Amato is the technical director of sales and marketing within the AMD company and he is involved in the distribution of AMD products on the European, African and Middle Eastern markets. In an interview with the hardware news site HWUpgrade, he talked about the new Fusion platform.
While he firmly stated that AMD has no definite plans and specification for the Fusion platform, he was able to deny the rumor that Fusion will come only in a single core chip. He also said that besides being a multi core platform, several GPUs could be linked together in a parallel interface not too different from the Crossfire one. The combined thermal design power by such an interface will be less than 120W.
When asked why AMD was researching a combined video and processor platform, Giuseppe Amato said that: "AMD changed from a processor company to a platform company [when we bought ATI]." This is where the Fusion platform comes in, as it is supposed to provide a high degree of flexibility. As AMD works to develop the Fusion platform, Amato said, they are following the general ideas behind GPGPU (general purpose computing on graphical processing units) and that Fusion was designed from the start to make the most of it, by splitting the work across the combined CPU and GPU. Every job will be analyzed and the code that is more suited for a specific part of the platform will be sent there (code that is more suited to being processed by a CPU will be sent to it, while code better ran on the GPU will be sent there).
The main advantage of this approach (at least on the drawing board) is that Fusion will be able to increase its efficiency and therefore reduce the required power to perform certain functions. Amato also dismissed the rumors about AMD selling its assembly plants as mere speculations, blaming the rumor on a gross misinterpretation of a recent speech by AMD's CEO Hector Ruiz.