AMD says future of GPUs is secure

AMD has said it plans to continue GPU development after its Fusion range of combined CPU/GPU chips appear.

Writing on the AMD blog, AMD client technology unit director Godfrey Cheng wrote "I believe that the best days of the GPU are ahead of it," before citing new Mercury research indicating that the Intel and Nvidia competitor is now the market leader in discreet graphics and stating that the company intends to expand the lead further. 

The new range of Fusion APUs will be pitched at "reducing power consumption and cost" rather than out and out performance, said Cheng. "In so doing we chose a level of graphics performance lower than that provided by our highest end discrete GPUs."

This product positioning paves the way for continuation of the lucrative high end discreet graphics business the company targets with the ATI Radeon range of products. Cheng indicated that GPU and APU design is continuing in parallel and that the company plans to release a new range of graphics cards before the end of the year.