Quote :

"Reading between the lines on this comment and others, I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty Intel will almost certainly be using its packaging skills to put a GPU in the same package as a Nehalem CPU. Furthermore, this is going to help out with mobile products, small-form-factor devices (*cough* Apple), and anywhere else that power and cooling are more critical than raw performance. I'd expect that such CPU/GPU devices will cut down on the number of on-die cores that you can put on the CPU die (for power dissipation reasons). So I expect a Nehalem CPU/GPU combination to consist of a dual-core Nehalem CPU that sports an on-die memory controller, with a GPU sandwiched in the same package with it. This will be a killer mobile part in terms of performance per watt. As far as the on-die memory controller, this has been a long time coming for Intel. Intel is saying that not every Nehalem part will necessarily have an integrated memory controller—they'll tweak the number of cores and the on-die components to fit certain performance-per-watt targets for certain segments. I expect all of the parts that sport an in-package GPU to also have an on-die memory controller, for performance and power reasons, but I may be wrong. "

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070328-intel-aims-nehalem-at-amds-fusion-integrated-graphics-on-die-memory-controller-smt.html

3/29/2007 11:49:03 AM