Chicago (IL) - We recently were able to spend some time with AMD to learn more about its upcoming chip technologies. Not surprisingly, one focus was Fusion, AMD's mysterious processor that will marry graphics and CPU in the 2009 or 2010 timeframe. We heard lots of buzzwords and did not see an actual product, but there was enough information to get a better idea of AMD's plans: Join us for a closer look at what Fusion may look like in three, four years.

And yes, we are interested in your take on Fusion. Let us know what you think about AMD's ideas and write a comment in the form at the end of this article.

AMD may be the perfect example to show how quickly fortunes in the semiconductor industry can change. While the company had a fantastic run from the end of 2003 until the third quarter of 2006, AMD recently has been going through a relentless beating from Intel since then. AMD teased Intel for some time, probably a bit too much, and it's payback time now: Intel appears to be stronger than ever and leaves no doubt that it will do everything it can to regain lost market shares.

There is also a strange sensation that Intel recently came up with several ideas that sounded very familiar to what we had heard previously over at AMD: Being able to out-spend and out-resource its much smaller rival several times over, it is a fact that Intel at least in theory has the ability to copy ideas from AMD and introduce products within a similar time frame. While we do not know, if Intel in fact is copying ideas from AMD, the reaction of AMD to be a bit more cautious about which product news are being disclosed and which not is somewhat conclusive.

AMD in Sunnyvale, California

However, the overall situation has put AMD in the very inconvenient position of not being able to talk about new products in order to keep analysts, investors (and, yes, journalists as well) happy. Negative headlines about the firm's financial performance dominated AMD articles in recent months as a result. Rather than waiting out the storm, AMD apparently is now taking steps to break the current pattern: The company is getting more active again and said that it will provide updates about its technology and product plans on a more regular basis.

At a recent event AMD briefed journalists about its future core key technologies, some of which we have agreed to not talk about just yet and some of which clarified AMD's direction. Much of the focus was put on the hybrid processor: While "Fusion" generated quite some interest and speculation last year, it recently was reduced to a buzzword that hardly anyone (outside of AMD) understands. Occasionally, we even heard that Fusion may only exist on paper to justify the acquisition of ATI.

Let's have a closer look at what we learned about this new processor concept.

Fusion essentially is the first phase in a vision of AMD that aims to take the traditional processor from the multicore-era into what the company calls "accelerated computing". Scheduled for a late 2009 or early 2010 release, Fusion will be offered as an entry-level / mainstream processor for notebooks initially. Over time, Fusion will develop into a broad family of products that eventually will span across most (complex) microprocessor markets.

AMD believes that the combination of graphics and a traditional CPU core on one die will offer three key advantages. (1) a better performance/watt ratio; (2) more performance through reduced latency between the CPU and the GPU; (3) some economic benefits as the production of one Fusion processor may be cheaper as a CPU and a separate graphics core. Putting a relatively low-end CPU-GPU solution into a notebook - and not into a desktop - also makes sense as users of such devices are unlikely to upgrade their system.

From a historical view, the integration of the GPU into the CPU could be considered as a natural evolution. Just like the FPU was absorbed by the CPU more than a decade ago, it isn't completely out of the question that basic graphics functionality could also become a feature of the CPU - a feature that we simply would expect in a few years down the road. Much more than it is the case today, graphics could become a "default" commodity.

As in the past, however, there are certain concerns whenever such an integration move happens: There are reasons why GPUs have not been integrated into CPUs and these reasons certainly include an economic component: Chip companies such as Intel want to sell silicon, as much as they can. Combining two chips into one chip at least theoretically reduces the number (and revenues) of chips that can be sold. So, if it were just about graphics, Fusion could be an extremely risky move for AMD from a financial perspective. But, as it turns out, the idea behind Fusion is not really about graphics - it is about opening up the graphics processor to general purpose applications. And this is where Fusion gets interesting.

Read on the next page: Roadmap - From graphics to general purpose applications