What's An Accelerated Processing Unit?

[caveman-jim]

A Video from AMD explains about what an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) is:

AMD's first APU's launched yesterday at CES 2011, with their brand new Bobcat x86 microarchtecture and DirectX 11 graphics.

[cbsboyer]

Cool, so the video agrees with logic - the integrated GPU in the fusion chip is best used for and intended for anything but graphics excepting in low end systems. This would be an excellent evolutionary move with OpenCL/DX11 compute and GPGPU apps, and would certainly not do away with the dedicated GPU for performance graphics.

[Treeckcold57]

In a few years later, maybe we will see the most advanced and fastest CPU integrated a fastest high-end GPU in a single die?

[cbsboyer]

Originally Posted by Treeckcold57

In a few years later, maybe we will see the most advanced and fastest CPU integrated a fastest high-end GPU in a single die?

The issue is memory bandwidth. Given that a GPU can bottleneck effective 1.5GHz, 256 bit DDR5 RAM now, what would a combined CPU/GPU need for high-end performance? Just imagine what that would do to motherboard layout and cost, not to mention cost for memory modules.

[Treeckcold57]

Originally Posted by cbsboyer

The issue is memory bandwidth. Given that a GPU can bottleneck effective 1.5GHz, 256 bit DDR5 RAM now, what would a combined CPU/GPU need for high-end performance? Just imagine what that would do to motherboard layout and cost, not to mention cost for memory modules.

True enough. I don't know if it is a really possible or not. We shall see.