AMD's Rivas tips chip vision

EE Times had a chance recently to speak with Mario Rivas , the new executive vice president at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. They hit on topics such as "AMD's strategy for developing its chips in the near future, ranging from the current Opteron platform, to which "AMD is absolutely committed," he said, to its Fusion chips--the silicon-level integration of CPU and GPU-- which are scheduled for launch in late 2008 or early 2009." Regarding Fusion, AMD hopes to deliver multicore products using different kinds of processing blocks. "Instead of rolling out its Fusion chips at the 65-nanometer node, AMD will wait until 45-nm process technology becomes available. Rivas said, "65 nm is not the right spot, because other products are already in development at 65 nm," referring to the plans AMD put in place prior to the company's acquisition of ATI Technologies, which it announced earlier this year."