AMD on the other hand had a better idea on evolving the CPU to the next level and they took huge risk in 2006. They acquired ATI and they immediately started working on integrating CPU and GPU, what we know as Fusion today. Like I said earlier, it can take years to bring out a revolutionary CPU. Since 2006 till now, while they were working heavily on bulldozer/fusion architecture, they were bringing out CPUs by minor modifications to the K8 architecture. And since K8 was an evolution from K7, AMD haas been hanging onto architecture from 1999.
Enter 2011, we are going to see a brand new architecture that will change the way that we thought of a CPU. it may even phase out the word CPU and we will start using APU to refer processing unit. Given their stenght in GPU area, we will soon see the APU itself able to run most of the games without the need for a GPU on the motherboard or a entrylevel or lower midrange dedicated GPU.
Given the way that Laptops are eating into desktops market share, AMD's Bulldozer can be a huge advantage for laptop manufacturers as it is going to provide an all round performance, eliminating the need for dedicated GPU. Llano (first gen fusion chip) has showed this recently. Though it's CPU part is slower than Intel's Sandbybridge, the GPU part is just spectacular and turned the APU out to be a superb all rounder for midrange laptops. This reduces power, reduces heat, increases battery life. This way, one need not pay heavy price for casual gaming laptops as they can get the same for laptops priced much lower. Bulldozer (Fusion gen2 and a true APU) will fill the CPU side gap between AMD and Intel thus giving the performance crown to AMD CPUs. This was already evident from the way that AMD took over the performance crown from Intel for netbooks (Intel Atom is no match to AMD's E-350 right now) and this is going to spread to notebooks and desktops, finally to servers in coming 1 year or 2.
In short, it's a tick-tock. Intel rules for some timeframe, then AMD takes over and vice versa. 1999-2006 was AMDs, 2006-2011/2012 will be Intels and then lets see how far AMD will go from 2011/2012.
I think you are confusing over fusion and bulldozer. Bulldozer is not fusion but purely a cpu codename. It does not have an integrated gpu communicating with cpu through peripheral interconnects.
The upcoming zambezi and kommodo cores are purely cpu cores and do not have embedded gpu.
LLano is fusion and uses x86-64 cpu cores along with vliw5 gpu core in a single-die. Current llano apu's use older phenom 2 architecture codenamed
stars and the gpu is radeon 5570 class dubbed as
sumo.
Next year, amd will launch
trinity that will have bulldozer cores for cpu and probably amd's next gen gpu cores featuring compute engines rather than vliw.
So bulldozer is purely a cpu and not an apu.
Tick tock is a model adopted by
Intel and this does not apply to
AMD.
Tick corresponds to a shrinking of semiconductor die to create a somewhat identical circuitry using a more advanced fabrication process, usually involving an advance of lithographic node. It reduces R&D costs and also gives better thermals to the chip overall and many more advantages.
Tock corresponds to micro architectural change.
Every year for intel is either a tick or a tock i.e, if this year is a
tock (sandybridge), next year will be a
tick (ivybridge) and the year after will again be a
tock (haswell) which is a new
microarchitecture.
Though amd also undergoes die shrinks and architectural change, it does not follow the tick-tock model.