Quote Originally Posted by bowman View Post
Seriously guys. It's just an IGP on the CPU. AMD calls it an 'APU', that's just marketing to make it sound more fancy than it really is. Same as the graphics cards have 1600 and 512 'cores'.
For a software developer it is MUCH more than "just an IGP". The magic happens here: "on the CPU".

If a CPU can manage for example 50 GFLOPS with two FPUs, an integrated GPU in a CPU with 120 SPs could do 80 GFLOPS, that alone would give HUGE floating point performance, the FPU part of the CPU could be dropped and all the floating point arithmetric moved to be handled by the APU.

...OR then use FPU and APU, voila, 130 GFLOPS on a (mainstream) CPU. The thing which interests me is the interface between the APU and OS. Is it just a graphics processor which needs drivers, or can the OS see it as a co-processor? Can the OS see it at all? What kind of ISA?