AMD Fusion to debut as 40nm with RV800 GPU

TG Daily has some new information about the Fusion, a project AMD has been working on since it acquired ATI in 2006. The site reports Shrike will be AMD's first CPU+GPU "Fusion" chip.

If their sources are right Shrike will feature a dual-core Phenom and a ATI RV800 GPU core. Furthermore, the site claims the Strike will use the half-node 40nm process when it launches and that a 32nm transition will happen in early 2010.

The first Fusion processor is code-named Shrike, which will, if our sources are right, consist of a dual-core Phenom CPU and an ATI RV800 GPU core. This news is actually a big surprise, as Shrike was originally rumored to debut as a combination of a dual-core Kuma CPU and a RV710-based graphics unit. A few more quarters of development time gave AMD time to continue working on a low-end RV800-based core to be integrated with Fusion. RV800 chips will be DirectX 10.1 compliant and are expected to deliver a bit more than just a 55 nm-40 nm dieshrink.

While Shrike will debut as a 40 nm chip, the processor is scheduled to transition to 32 nm at the beginning of 2010 - not much later than Intel will introduce 32 nm - and serve as a stop-gap before the next-gen CPU core, code-named "Bulldozer" arrives. The Bulldozer-based chip, code-named “Falcon”, will debut with TSMC's 32nm SOI process, instead of the originally planned 45 nm.