AMD Fusion delayed to 2010

AMD's Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester said in an interview that AMD's Fusion project will be in production only in late 2009. This means it won't be available until 2010, which is later than the company initially expected.

“The first fusion CPUs will be available in prototype in late 2008 and in production in late 2009,” said Phil Hester, chief technology officer of AMD, in an interview with InfoWorld.

Earlier the company indicated that Fusion processors “are expected in late 2008/early 2009”, and the company anticipated to use them within all of the chipmaker’s “priority computing categories”, including laptops, desktops, workstations and servers, as well as in “consumer electronics and solutions tailored for the unique needs of emerging markets”. This time Mr. Hester confirmed that the first applications to use Fusion would be notebooks, but declined to indicate, when the company plans to offer something for other computing platforms.

“We’ve already, through discussions with our customers, reached agreement that the best place to initially focus this is the notebook space. That is where you get the most benefit of the efficiencies from a power standpoint and also from a physical area standpoint,” Mr. Hester said.

AMD's view on GPUs is that they are ready to be integrated into CPUs, just like with floating point co-processing units (FPUs) in the mid-80s.