AMD Kickstarts Fusion

The long awaited Fusion concept for AMD finally goes into action. AMD announced that they were launching three range of processors expected in the coming months. AMD prefers to call them APUs or Accelerated Processing Units. AMD has managed to forge together a processor and a DX11 complaint GPU into one. For programmers, it would mean good multi-threaded processing performance.

There are two ranges of APUs to be launched in the beginning. The E-series (codenamed Zacate), which has been designed for notebooks and compact desktops. The TDP of these processors would be 18W and core speeds around 1.6 GHz. For netbooks, the C-series (codenamed Ontario) would be the processors of choice. Core speeds for these processors would also be lower. The A-series of processors (codenamed Llano) are designed for more power hungry systems. Those processors will feature a quad-core processor. Llano is said to land up at the end of the first half of this year. The C and E-series of the Fusion processors should be with us in the Q2 2011. Expect products from brands such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba very soon.