AMD Merging Its CPU and GPU Business

Three years after buying ATI, AMD is reorganizing its GPU and CPU business under the same roof. The goal is to unify the company’s goals, but also unify CPU and GPU in a single chip – the vision that led to the ATI acquisition in the first place. As far as we know, the plan is to get a fused CPU and GPU sometime in 2011.

People have becoming impatient and investors must have questioned the logic of getting a multi-billion debt, asking for when it will pay off. Since then, AMD has been using “Fusion” left and right, but they basically believe in heterogeneous computing, which is the usage of CPUs associated with arrays of smaller units, like those found in GPUs. NVIDIA is currently doing quite well with CUDA and Intel is working on Larrabee, its own GPU.

Intel and NVIDIA have clear long-term plans, even if both will have to fight to prevail. AMD’s plans are blurry to say the least. But that could get clearer soon with this re-org.