AMD's first Fusion chip will only contain one CPU and one GPU, if a slip by Giuseppe Amato, technical director of sales and marketing at AMD is true.

The combined CPU/GPU chip should launch in 2009 and Amato said it would only have one CPU and one GPU on a single piece of silicon. When I asked him to confirm this he said a very definitive yes, but later backtracked saying he would rather not talk about the issue and that actually the first Fusion chips might have multiple CPU cores.

From this, I'd suggest a basic birth for the new processor. Getting one CPU and one GPU talking to each other on one piece of silicon is no small feat and this has to be the first step before you start adding multiple CPUs, crossbars and caches.

Additionally, talk of multiple GPUs on one die (internal-crossfire, say) should never become an talking point, since multiple GPUs on the same die are just an amalgamation of pipelines into a bigger stream processor, unlike multicore CPUs.

During a different part of his presentation, Amato spoke about the $100 one laptop per child initiative. Fascinatingly, if you delve into its specs it quickly becomes clear that AMD is already using its Fusion ideas in developing the $100 laptop CPU, the Geode GX-500.

It has an integrated graphics controller and unified memory architecture, so AMD already has some experience in doing CPUGPUs. A small number of these laptops are already knocking about, although they won't officially ship until 2008.

Finally, and we all know it's coming, Amato dropped some hints about ATI chips being made in AMD fabs. ATI, now know internally as AMD north since they're Canadians, will transition its stuff to AMD foundries "where it makes sense to do it". Originally AMD kept schtum on the issue, perhaps because it didn't want to piss off TMSC and UMC, which currently manufacture the graphics chips.