AMD Announces CPU-GPU Megachip Combo

AMD and Intel have competed for years in the performance arena, and a recently announced CPU-GPU combo could make AMD the frontrunner. The high-performance CPU-GPU megachip will reportedly be able to deliver teraflops of performance.

While AMD and Intel have sparred for supreme champion on the performance circuit, Intel’s flagship i7 5960x is supposedly the most powerful CPU available. Forbes contributor Jason Evangelho posted benchmarks of AMD’s R9 390 GPU compared to Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti, and according to his research, the 390 beat the 980. So AMD appears to be dominating graphics performance.

Lately, AMD has concentrated on delivering energy efficient components, and surprisingly hefty performance. I’m still amazed at the recent games my laptop, equipped with an AMD A10-4600k and Radeon 7660g integrated graphics, can run on high detail on a 1080p display. However, the forthcoming and yet unnamed CPU-GPU megachip won’t be aimed at gamers. Rather, it’s more tailored to workstations requiring beefy computing power, or servers. This doesn’t mean that a gaming variation won’t be available eventually, or that AMD’s megachip can’t be tweaked to fit gaming needs, but it’s made with computation in mind.

This is massive news for high-performance PCs, and a migration toward CPU and GPU integration might be the next big advancement in computer hardware.