AMD: Fusion Makes a Lot of Sense for Next-Generation Game Consoles

From X-bit Labs: The head of software developers relations at Advanced Micro Devices said that the company's Fusion concept makes a lot of sense for next-generation game consoles as it offers a number of capabilities that enables unique advantages.

"I think a Fusion-based a huge amount of sense for next-generation consoles. If you are looking at a system that is going to be able to provide a great deal of horsepower, certainly the Fusion architecture makes sense," said Neal Robison, senior director of content and application support, in an interview with X-bit labs that was updated late on Sunday.

It is interesting to note that current-generation video game consoles already use multi-core microprocessors and Sony PlayStation 3 even uses Cell heterogeneous multi-core microprocessor. AMD's Fusion concept is indeed a heterogeneous multi-core chip as it contains x86 processing cores as well as Radeon stream computing elements. It looks like it is pretty natural for AMD to offer a Fusion-based system-on-chip (SoC) or a combination of a heterogeneous multi-core accelerated processing unit with some high-speed stream processor inside along with a discrete graphics chips with fixed-function hardware. The first scenario seems more likely.

"I see the Fusion architecture as capable of scaling both up and down. We’ve already talked in the past about the role of the Fusion architecture in areas such as server, and we think that our architecture is strong enough to be able to scale to many different usage scenarios," said Mr. Robison.

It is noteworthy that Nvidia Corp. also pins a lot of hopes onto its project Denver, which is Nvidia's approach to fusing CPUs and GPUs.

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