# Fusion confusion



## spm (May 6, 2011)

Am all confused about the fusion thing. 
I have a very old rig, a P4 2.2 GHz, 756MB ram, 80 + 40 GB HDD, DVD writer, SAmsung b1930 monitor and a gigabyte 82845 MB.
Now i would like to do some CAD designing using AutoCad, Pro-E, Catia etc.
So am thinking of an upgrade. Am a mechanical engineering student and have summer vacations (May-June) now and would like to try out these softs for the vacetion. My budget will be somewhere around 15k. i would need a MB proccy and Ram and i suppose that i would need to change the PSU too.
I understand that within my budget the best option would be to go for AMD as it would offer more real cores and the design softwares can utilize real cores more effectively than hyperthreaded ones (correct me if am wrong).
1.so should i wait for fusion or should i go for the current generation products.
2. Does the fusion offer considerable increase in performance.
3. will the IGP solution in current and fusion products be able to handle the    design softwares. will fusion IGP offer better performance over the current 8xx series IGPs.
4. will fusion make sense to my budget.

sorry for such a long query. just wanted u guys to get a good view of the situation. Please help. Thanks in advance.


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## Joker (May 6, 2011)

yes..fusion IGP will be MILES better than any current gen IGP.

in 15k, all you can go for now is:

athlon II x4 640 @ 4.5k (quad core)
gigabyte 785gmt-us2h @ 3.5k
2*2gb kingston/corsair ddr3 ram @ 2.2k
sapphire/msi hd 5670 1gb @ 4.8k (discrete gpu) - u can go for 512mb version if u can find it. not much of performance difference.

total = 15k

fusion will have an IGP as strong as hd 5670 built-in.


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## spm (May 6, 2011)

so fusion will have a IGP as capable as the hd 5670. and the CPU will be much better i think. am i right?
and what abt the pricing of fusion. If the pricing is almost the same is there
 any use in waiting for fusion.
how will it affect my future upgrade options...


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## Joker (May 6, 2011)

u have a good point there. CPU will be only an enhanced athlon II. i cant comment on pricing though.

u can go for the above mentioned config if u want.

fusion will give similar performance. the only difference is - CPU & GPU on the same chip and lower power consumption.


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## spm (May 6, 2011)

what abt the upgrades in the future. will fusion provide more scope for upgrade than the present hardware..?

BTW I just called up a local hardware dealer to know the pricing of the above config.


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## Joker (May 6, 2011)

definitely it would.

currently amd llano (fusion) = athlon ii x4 + hd 6630 on the same chip.

in future it will be much stronger amd bulldozer cpu + stronger hd 7000 series gpu on the same chip.


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## spm (May 6, 2011)

bulldozer will be too far in the future.  and one last thing is there any cance that by introduction of fusion the athlon  II x4 prices would decline my a good margin. Then it would be far more affordable


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## Skud (May 6, 2011)

Athlon II X4 prices are already very low. I doubt whether it would decline much after introduction of bulldozer.


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## coderunknown (May 6, 2011)

cpu won't be as powerful as Intel's counterpart but it'll allow you to game without worrying about any GPU straightway. & i feel Fusion will cost a lot. so your best bet is to go with Joker's suggestion.

also to get a HD5670 like performance, you'll need top of the line APU that will cost quite a bit.

AMD slashes processor prices yesterdays' news.


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## Skud (May 6, 2011)

That's some pretty huge price cuts. With the price cut of energy efficient CPUs being more, it looks like AMD is having some really good CPUs up its sleeves.


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## spm (May 6, 2011)

Now am not going for fusion.
so how long should i wait till the price cut is evident in the indian market..

i guess i will start a new thread in the PC Components / Configurations for the config.


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## coderunknown (May 6, 2011)

^^ keep an eye @ SMC's price.


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## spm (May 6, 2011)

@Sam k buddy


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## Skud (May 6, 2011)

Global CPU price cuts generally reflect pretty quickly in Indian market. Lets see.


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## spm (May 6, 2011)

hoping them to fall overnight....


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## Cilus (May 6, 2011)

llano is not just some tweaked Athlon II + AMD 6 series GPU, don't confuse it with Intel's Sandybridge On-Die GPU.

In Intel Sandybdridge, The GPU is connected to the PCI Express bus is embedded in a single die along with the GPU and they are separate unit. That's why a dedicated GPU is added the onboard GPU gets disabled as the PCI Express bus is used to connect the discrete GPU.

In llano, the GPU is not connected to the CPU using any PCI X bus, they are connected some CPU Interconnect technology, more like Hyper Transport technology and they can communicate with each other irrespective of the presence of any external GPU.

Here the On-Die gpu can be considered as a heterogeneous core present inside the Die and the whole thing is called APU. That's why why AMD APU's graphics engine can work simultaneously to assist the external GPU and the more inserting thing is....it can actually help the CPU to execute X86 codes, increasing the overall performance in even non-GPU intensive works. Example are Oracle query optimization, running IE9 or Firefox 4 or scientific calculations like Matlab object design. So don't consider it The CPU and GPU die as separate computing unit.


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## Skud (May 6, 2011)

Some nice info there. I was not aware of the whole thing. Thanks, Cilus.


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## kamal_saran (May 6, 2011)

@cilus bro nice info. . .


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## Piyush (May 6, 2011)

@cilus
so we can expect from intel to come up with the same features that would be present in bulldozer?
i mean is Ivybridge the bulldozer competitor?


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## vickybat (May 6, 2011)

^^Not exactly. Intel will come up with its own ideas and won't follow bulldozer. Besides llano is not bulldozer.

Its actually the other way round i.e bulldozer will be sandy and ivybridge's competitor. Amd is the underdog here remember.


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## Cilus (May 6, 2011)

Making a heterogeneous processor or a Die consisting of different type of cores with inbuit interconnect is not an easy job and they are far more complex than creating current generation multicore homogeneous processors where all the cores are of same type.
AMD has been working on this field for last 5-6 years, even before the launch of their Phenom (1) processors and it is like Intel's Larabee project.

So don't expect Intel to just implement some equivalent technology sooner. It is not so easy. By the way, even llano CPU core is actually based on K10 architecture which is currently in use in Phenom II/Athlon II processors, it is going to have a lot of tweaking.

The fabrication process will be 32 nm, so expect more Transistors in a die, less power consumption and less heat. Also the it allows the processors to run at very high speed. It can also help to integrate a more efficient and fast memory controller to increase the Memory rad/Write performance...a field where AMD is lagging in quiet a margin from Intel.


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## vickybat (May 6, 2011)

^^Correct buddy. 

Don't expect intel to jump guns straightaway. Its clear that intel is lagging behind amd in gpu technology and amd is clearly superior here after aquiring ati. So to attack fusion, intel has to strengthen its gpu prowess and the first implementation will be on ivybridge.
The current EU's of sandybridge are no match to the cedar based radeon gpu's in performance.
So simply replacing the sandy igp's pci express bus lane with some *qpi* like interconnect won't help cause the gpu isn't strong enough to challenge llano. Intel has to do something out of the box.

Its gonna take a while for intel to come up with something. But exceptions always happen and who knows what trick intel has in their sleeves. 

Amd is expecting to capture the mainstream market with llano and it might as well successfully do it.


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## spm (May 7, 2011)

nice info here.
@Cilus great work bro. 
BTW does this mean i have to change my decision. i was hoping to go for the current products( athlon II x4 640). so is fusion worth a wait for me in this budget.


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## Skud (May 7, 2011)

^^wait for a couple of months, if you can, then make a decision


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## vickybat (May 7, 2011)

spm said:


> nice info here.
> @Cilus great work bro.
> BTW does this mean i have to change my decision. i was hoping to go for the current products( athlon II x4 640). so is fusion worth a wait for me in this budget.



Yes its worthwhile if you are not planning to go for a gpu right away. The llano apu's will be launched on june 20 2011 worldwide. 

The gpu performance of the quad apu will be somewhere close to a 5670 in performance.


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