Intel gets ready to kill off AMD Fusion

OK – there's no way that we'd get a direct quote like that from a company as steady and stable as Intel, but this is definitely the sentiment around the 10th floor in the Grand Hyatt at the heart of Taipei's business district. KitGuru engages Dumbo-flaps and listens to the hottest gossip.

While the majority of the action at Computex 2011 takes place at the enormous NanGang exhibition centre, there is still plenty going on in the Grand Hyatt hotel and the surrounding World Trade Centre sites.

The tenth floor of the hotel is full of private Intel suites, and it's around these suites that KitGuru spies do their best listening.

So what have we heard?

Well, it seems that Intel's confidence in Haswell is ‘beyond the charts'. Not only does the chip giant believe that the regular Haswell CPUs will smack AMD's best offerings around – it also believes that it can kill AMD on pure graphics performance.

Bold claim indeed!

Haswell is the 22nm sucessor to Sandy Bridge – and it's likely to be in mass market production by the end of 2012.

It will utilise Intel's new 3D gate technology, a much phatter pipeline and 8 full cores.

That said, there's nothing in the available info to suggest why Intel is so confident. Even with a full 16MB shared (new) cache, it's unclear how the graphics units can be improved enough to take out the Radeon-born 3D power of the Fusion chips.

KitGuru says: If AMD can deliver Llano to market quickly, then it will have a minimum of 6 months clear run at the integrated market, but is that enough to stay ahead of the world's biggest microprocessor company?  We will catch up with AMD next week and see if they are prepared to respond.

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