Intel to Use PowerVR Graphics in New Atom CPU

[vickybat]

Finally amd zacate fusion platform will have competition. Intel is touting its atom successor cedarview to fuse with powerVR graphics core which does duty in arm based soc's in ipad2 and the yet to be launched NGP.

It seems intel will have serious graphics horsepower over its earlier iterations and finally give zacate some competition in the graphics department. It will also employ hardware accelerated video decoding like quicksync.

Source

 

[saswat23]

So, now we can no longer say FUSION means AMD. Intel too has started its Fusion bussiness with its new successor CEDARVIEW.
Really a great news indeed.

 

[coderunknown]

don't know how much improvement in performance will come with it but efficiency will surely take a leap.

 

[Cilus]

It is not at all any fusion, Intel is using the concept of SOC or system in chip over here. It is not at all new and present in the market for at least 1 decade. In PDA, Tablets and Smart phones, they have a single chip and every thing like Signal Processor, Audio/Video decoder, CPU(Normally ARM Cortex based), GPU, Ram, Rom etc are fabricated into it. It is not fusion and actually is abig chip containing all the components inside it.
The only difference will be instead of PCI Express BUS the CPU and the new GPU will communicate by using some Interconnect bus.

 

[vickybat]

Actually "fusion" is amd's trademark of naming technology for x86 already present in ARM. All soc's are kind of fusion which basically incorporate both cpu and gpu on a single die.

So we can term cedarview as something fusion like because the cpu and gpu are not sharing the pcie bus for intercommunication.

Even fusion in a big chip with cpu and gpu. Its a smart move from intel for including powerVR graphics for next gen ATOM. Now how smart this move will can only be known after its launched.

 

[rajan1311]

So, now we can no longer say FUSION means AMD. Intel too has started its Fusion bussiness with its new successor CEDARVIEW.
Really a great news indeed.

this aint fusion, if this was "fusion", intel has had it since core i3 days...but its not...read cilus's post..

 

[Cilus]

Vicky System on Chip or SOC is not at all fusion, here each of the components are separate and they are not fabricated in a single die, they are fabricated inside a single chip. And hardly each of the components can be considered as a heterogeneous core of the whole chip. it is more like a CPU + motherboard with all components inside a single package.
The working principle is also quite different as each of the units are having their own separate task. 1st it receives the instruction sets and the scheduler logic decides what instructions need to be sent to which component. So the graphics Instructions go to the GPU, signal related processing goes to Signal Processing unit, HD video/Audio decoding instructions will go to the Audio/Video encoder. But you cannot write a code in openCL (open compuetr Language) language to make them work simultaneously or assist each other as it does with a chip with SIMD cores.
They are more like 8 core nVidia Tegra 2 where you have 8 cores inside the chip, dedicated to different functions, but can't assist each other.

Whereas Fusion is a heterogeneous core design, it is a single unit with many SIMD units which may or may not be of same type. You can access them by using OpenCl programming language as a single entity and directly assign code path to each of the execution unit through the coding. Example is say...performing square root of each element of an array with very large number of values. Normally it should be executed in the CPU cores but in OpenCL language the code can be written in such a way that it will be executed in the GPU core and no hardware prediction is required.

You can't do it with SOC systems.

 

[vickybat]

^^ Ok buddy i get it. But cedarview is not SOC afaik. The package does not include ram and other components as you see in an soc. If you can see the package, cedarview includes the graphics core , cpu core, memory controller, graphics controller & a dedicated hardware decoding unit ( a la quick sync not found in amd).

*i56.tinypic.com/14v4ubt.png

Now fusion also has a similar architecture which includes a cpu and gpu core connected via some interconnect as you see here in cedarview. Its not like sandybridge cpu's. So you can call it a heterogenerous architecture because of disimillar cores. So i think here too the gpu can assist the cpu. For example in cell processors, the spe's can handle vertex shading along with cpu based computations and they are simd based. The powerVR sgx going to be used here will itself be a dual core version. But wheteher it can handle x86 instuction sets or opencl codepath is not known.

Very little is known on this so waiting to find out may be worthwhile.

 

[rajan1311]

the new atom is scheduled for next year right? 32nm,6W (or something?) , dual core?

 

[coderunknown]

6W for a dual core? WOW