The folks from AMD have recently released new names for upcoming projects they're working on: the AMD Phenom processor, the new Stars CPU naming, and the Fusion platform.
First off, we have the new Phenom CPU. This is simply AMD's replacement for the Athlon name on their high end desktop CPUs. Instead of the Athlon X2, X4, and Athlon FX, we'll now have the Phenom X2 and X4, and Phenom FX. The Athlon and Sempron names will stay where they are on the mid-range and low end respectively. The Phenom name should start coming on packages when the Agena (aka Barcelona) core CPUs start shipping later this year. It's gonna take this geek a little time to get used to saying he has an AMD Phenom CPU now... AMD also announced a new naming standard for all their processors. No longer will you have to tell everyone you have an AMD Athlon (or Phenom) X2 4400+ 1MB L2 Toledo core. According to Dailytech, it will be more like "Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 45W 1MB L2 Brisbane" to "AMD BE-2400." For more info on the full lineup of Phenom CPUs, check out this article from Anandtech.
Stars, on the other hand, is a much wider name change. The last several generations of AMD CPU cores have all had city names. Barcelona, Winchester, Windsor, Brisbane, Venice, etc... Now AMD is switching to star names for its CPU cores. Agena, Kuma, Rana, and Spica are among the first. Pretty cool, eh? But that's not all. With the new names comes new technology too. The Stars CPUs will incorporate the new HyperTransport 3.0 technology, replacing HyperTransport 1.0. HT 3.0 will still be backwards compatible with HT 1.0. HT 3.0 should provide about double the memory bandwidth of HT 1.0, and will also allow the integrated memory controller and CPU to run at different frequencies. This should provide a great deal better performance with new PCI-Express 2.0 and multi-CPU systems in the near future. Stars processors will also introduce a 128-bit floating point unit for each core of the CPU, and support for DDR2-1066 RAM. Also supported are SSE4A instruction sets. Another big new feature is the addition of a shared L3 cache on Agena and Kuma core CPUs. All Stars CPUs will be compatible with both socket AM2+ and AM2.
While Phenom and Stars are changes that will be made in the next year or so, Fusion is a way off, but no less exciting. Fusion, at it's core, is the combination of CPU and GPU onto a single processing chip, for massive processing power. GPUs currently have tremendous parellel processing power, which, along with the ability to generate realistic 3d images, gives them incredible floating point processing capabilities, which goes largely unexploited. CPUs on the other hand, handle data sequentially. GPUs are good at handling certain types of data that CPUs are rather slow at, and vice versa. Fusion aims to combine them, to create a chip that can handle all types of data, and handle it at speeds unheard of today. But, the success of this depends on software support of the system, among other things. Just like 64-bit CPUs today, which have largely gone unsupported by the software industry, Fusion may not gain their support either. If it does not, then it will merely be a CPU, with an integrated graphics processor built onto the same chip. The GPU will not be used to its full capability for running programs where massive parallel processing is ideal. It will stay much as it is today. A 3d rendering chip. This is seen by much of the industry as a big gamble by AMD. Will it pay off? Who knows. It certainly looks like the next logical step in technology to me though.
If you'd like to read more about Fusion, read these stories at TGDaily, and Anandtech.
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