World’s economic crisis started to act as eraser on Intel’s roadmap. According to our highly positioned sources, Intel decided to cancel the 45nm “Fusion” processors (CPU+GPU), probably branded as Core i3 (or i4?) processors.

Intel cancelled the 45nm “fusion” CPU+GPU…

..but even that means Intel will have 12 months advantage over AMD’s Fusion chips.

Auburndale and Havendale were multi-chip modules featuring two hyper-threaded cores and integrated graphics chip. According to a diagram above, Auburndale/Havendale consisted out of two pieces of silicon: CPU part with two cores sharing 4MB of L3 cache memory and a separate graphics core connected by using Quick Path Interface (QPI).

Auburndale was supposed to debut on market as 35/45W mainstream and business notebook processor, while Havendale was the desktop versions, consuming as much as 75W (higher clocks). But, the economic crisis played its part and Intel isn’t so interested in keeping the 45nm production alive for these two parts. 45nm production will be kept in place for Pentium and Core 2 Duo/Quad processors for the mainstream crowd, and Core i7 for those on higher end of scale.

But, this is not the end of Fusion concept in Santa Clara. Intel is going to replace Auburndale/Havendale with their 32nm die-shrink, known as Arandale. Arandale was originally supposed to debut for Back to School season 2010, alongside 32nm quad-core and sexa-core Westmere processors (Core i7 die-shrinks). But now, Arandale core has been brought forward by six months to Q1′2010. The debut is set probably for March (can you say CeBIT?) timeframe. We don’t have any piece of information on Arandale, besides the fact that it is a die-shrink and will probably feature larger L3 cache, probably somewhere in the range of 6MB, just like current 45nm Wolfdale processors (6MB L2 cache).

If you are wondering what’s going on with AMD’s Fusion processors, don’t think that this cancellation of 45nm parts will give AMD much needed breathing space, since AMD delayed its own Fusion CPU+GPU chips from Q3′2008 (yes, last year) to 2011! Then again, at least we’re talking about completely new CPU core, quad-core Llano and dual-core Ontario.