AMD Showcased Its First Fusion Processor

Before the eyes of JagatReview and many other foreign media, AMD showcased its first Fusion processor, Zacate, in San Francisco, the United States. The processor combines 2 CPU cores and 1 GPU core in a single package. In their live demo in one of the hotels at the 3rd Street area, San Francisco, AMD unveiled a working sample unit. This particular Zacate sample is a mobile version meant for notebook and netbook use. Jagatreview happens to be the first Indonesian media who managed to get a direct coverage of this brand new processor while it was up and running.

Performance

AMD limited the live demo to the City of Heroes game, the IE9 book reader, and the HTML5-based Psychadelic Benchmark only. Zacate’s integrated graphics chip seemed to perform better than Core i5 processor placed right next to it for comparison purposes. Across most of the benchmarks, the integrated Radeon GPU in this Fusion processor produced twice as much score compared to its intended adversary.

Specification

AMD did not disclose too much information on the technical specs. What we do know is that the processor comes with 18W of TDP, and is meant for notebooks in the US$ 500 price range. A different Fusion processor, codenamed Ontario, will further reduce the TDP to 9 W and is targeted towards the netbook market. This next processor, coming in very small packaging, is fabricated using the 40nm process that allows for a very low operating temperature. However, despite its seemingly timid profile, the integrated GPU core in this processor can be employed to accelerate GPGPU-enabled applications through the AMD Stream.

According to schedule, AMD will begin shipping the first Fusion CPUs by the end of 2010. AMD estimates that the processor would have been incorporated in notebooks or small-form-factor motherboards by early 2011. AMD has no plan to sell the processor separately in individual packages.