AMD Fusion now pushed back to 2011

One of the updates that came out of AMD's Financial Analyst day today is that the company's much-discussed Fusion CPU+GPU hybrid will not appear until the company transitions to 32nm technology. That means no Fusion CPUs until 2011 at the earliest. The Shrike platform, once planned to be some sort of next-generation Shanghai + integrated GPU on 45nm has now been canceled altogether. Long-term, AMD still claims to believe in the power of Fusion—just not on a 45nm process.

This may be disappointing news to some, but it's probably a good move for the company. It was never very clear how AMD was going to economically deliver an integrated GPU on 45nm, even if it went for two separate dies on the same physical packaging. A Fusion part needs to be cheap enough that OEMs prefer it (as opposed to an integrated GPU + discrete processor), while simultaneously performing well enough to make customers want it. It can't be all that expensive, either, considering the fact that a relatively modern HD Radeon 3450 sells for just $29 at NewEgg. Waiting for 32nm to come online buys the company both breathing room and die space, and AMD could use a bit of both.

A block diagram of Fusion

Over the next two years, AMD plans to split itself in half, successfully launch The Foundry Company, manage its own 32nm transition, and break ground on Fab 4x in New York, which will come online as a 32nm plant. Bobcat and Bulldozer, meanwhile, may have been delayed, but they aren't gone; both are currently scheduled for launch in 2011. On the server side, AMD has to scale Shanghai through its 45nm lifespan, release the six-core Constantinople Istanbul variant (coming in second half 2009), and successfully launch its first in-house server chipset, Fiorano. On the GPU side, AMD must continue to gain ground (or hold what it has gained) in the GPU market, and transition the Radeon series down to 40nm, with 32nm possibly following after.

That's an aggressive launch schedule, particularly from a company in as precarious a position as AMD is, and successfully executing it will require a great deal of skill. Shanghai is far stronger out of the gate than Barcelona ever was, but it'll be quite some time before Sunnyvale is back on any kind of good financial footing. As for what's coming post-Shanghai on the desktop, AMD did release a few details. It plans to introduce two 32nm Bulldozer cores in 2011, Llano and Ontario. Llano will be a quad-core part with support for DDR3 and up to 8MB of cache, while Ontario will be a dual-core laptop part with an integrated GPU. There's no word yet on the company's "Quebec" processor, but we expect that core will feature AMD's Separatist Technology. Rumor has it that the project is bogged down in negotiations, most of which are aimed at persuading the upcoming chip that it is not, in fact, a Xeon.

Resource - Ars Technica