Engineers at North Carolina State University have used a novel technique to boost the performance of an AMD Fusion APU by more than 20%. This speed-up was achieved purely through software and using commercial (probably Llano) silicon. No overclocking was used.
In an AMD APU there is both a CPU and GPU, both on the same piece of silicon. In conventional applications — in a Llano-powered laptop, for example — the CPU and GPU hardly talk to each other; the CPU does its thing, and the GPU pushes polygons. What the researchers have done is to marry the CPU and GPU together to take advantage of each core’s strengths.
To achieve the 20% boost, the researchers reduce the CPU to a fetch/decode unit, and the GPU becomes the primary computation unit. This works out well because CPUs are generally very strong at fetching data from memory, and GPUs are essentially just monstrous floating point units. In practice, this means the CPU is focused on working out what data the GPU needs (pre-fetching), the GPU’s pipes stay full, and a 20% performance boost arises.