AMD Fusion

[Lemur]

When I say "fusion," I do not mean awful music, the process by which the sun turns hydrogen into helium, or the sort of thing that gives physics grad students geek wood. Rather, I'm referring to AMD's GPU/CPU product that is meant to allow serious gaming on el cheapo laptops.

I think I may allow myself to become excited about these things. By my reckoning, HP is the first to market with a Fusion netbook. Here's a video review of it, including L4D2 playing at what appear to be perfectly acceptable framerates. Try that on your GMA 950 Intel craptactular netbook. Suck on this, Atom platform!



Question: Is there any conceivable reason not to be jazzed about this as a gamer?

[Beskar]

That looks awesome. My laptop cannot even run Left 4 Dead 2 on everything set the minimum and that Netbook is like half the price of what it would have cost me*

Though apparently, there are no plans yet to sell it over in the UK.




(I got it for free)

[Tellos Athenaios]

@Lemur: this is the high range, i.e. the parade piece of fusion kit being trotted out there in the HP. Fusion combines the mobile ATI 6xxx range of graphics chips with a decent CPU --for the niche. By contrast its direct competitor Atom is simply an awful CPU much like the old Celerons, and the Intel graphics cards really are not meant to be used for much more than hardware accelerated video playback.

Also, there are more players than just HP with a Fusion thing to sell.

But here's the rub: as we saw in Strike's laptop thread such a piece of kit costs near enough the same price of a lower end core i3 machine. Thus in other words, if you have more than $600,- to splash out on a laptop, you might consider a midrange core i3 machine where the graphics will be roughly on par with the Fusion (and they certainly will be once the ATI 6xxx mobile chips replace the 5xxx ones there). And things such as screens and speakers tend to be better for gaming if they're bigger which again pushes you towards these midrange laptops.

So as someone who wants to play games on a budget, the Fusion platform is a tantalising hint of what may be to come for the next few years but right now I think it is too expensive in comparison with more sensible midrange laptop offerings (if “sensible” is of any concern when buying a new gaming toy, that is).

[Furunculus]

@Lemur: this is the high range, i.e. the parade piece of fusion kit being trotted out there in the HP. Fusion combines the mobile ATI 6xxx range of graphics chips with a decent CPU --for the niche. By contrast its direct competitor Atom is simply an awful CPU much like the old Celerons, and the Intel graphics cards really are not meant to be used for much more than hardware accelerated video playback.

Also, there are more players than just HP with a Fusion thing to sell.

But here's the rub: as we saw in Strike's laptop thread such a piece of kit costs near enough the same price of a lower end core i3 machine. Thus in other words, if you have more than $600,- to splash out on a laptop, you might consider a midrange core i3 machine where the graphics will be roughly on par with the Fusion (and they certainly will be once the ATI 6xxx mobile chips replace the 5xxx ones there). And things such as screens and speakers tend to be better for gaming if they're bigger which again pushes you towards these midrange laptops.

So as someone who wants to play games on a budget, the Fusion platform is a tantalising hint of what may be to come for the next few years but right now I think it is too expensive in comparison with more sensible midrange laptop offerings (if “sensible” is of any concern when buying a new gaming toy, that is).

amd won't stand still either.

in less than four months you will be able to buy an AMD "Llano" Fusion laptop.

It will be manufactured at 32nm, instead of 40nm for Zacate.

It will use full Phenom 2 CPU cores for much greater performance.

It will have 480 to 640 DX11 shaders instead of a mere 80.

It will have 128bit DDR3 memory interface instead of only 64bit.

The low-power dualcore version only has a 20W TDP for cpu/gpu/mem-controller, and even the high-end quad-cores will use only 59W.

I'm pinning my hopes on a 20W dual-core in an 11.6" chassis, able to play any game at 1366x768 at more than minimum settings.

[Tellos Athenaios]

amd won't stand still either.

in less than four months you will be able to buy an AMD "Llano" Fusion laptop.

It will be manufactured at 32nm, instead of 40nm for Zacate.

It will use full Phenom 2 CPU cores for much greater performance.

It will have 480 to 640 DX11 shaders instead of a mere 80.

It will have 128bit DDR3 memory interface instead of only 64bit.

The low-power dualcore version only has a 20W TDP for cpu/gpu/mem-controller, and even the high-end quad-cores will use only 59W.

I'm pinning my hopes on a 20W dual-core in an 11.6" chassis, able to play any game at 1366x768 at more than minimum settings.

As I said, right now it's a tantalising hint of what may be yet to come. Anyway, the AMD Fusion kind of immediately obsoletes Razer's mobile PC gaming thing we discussed earlier, doesn't it?

[Furunculus]

the AMD Fusion kind of immediately obsoletes Razer's mobile PC gaming thing we discussed earlier, doesn't it?

it does indeed!