Ars Technica’s Jon Stokes discusses what he has learned about AMD’s new “Fusion” CPU / GPU designs…
My immediate reaction on hearing Moore describe this was that AMD was planning to pursue the Larrabee route, and replace the GPU with a pool of small x86 cores. Obviously, you have to expose this ‘GPU’ hardware (in whatever form) to the OS as x86 hardware, so you’d do this by either making it actual x86 hardware or by doing binary translation. But Moore’s answer to a subsequent question along these lines made it clear that AMD sees the cost of replicating x86 front-end decode hardware across multiple small cores as too steep; instead, the company will more ‘tightly integrate’ the math hardware into the CPU core.