AMD: The Fusion APU Era Has Begun

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By Kevin Parrish
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AMD says that big experiences, sleek designs, all-day battery life and notebooks that stay cool all day are now possible with the new Fusion APU.

AMD says that big experiences, sleek designs, all-day battery life and notebooks that stay cool all day are now possible with the new Fusion APU.

Tuesday AMD officially launched its Fusion family of Accelerated Processing Units. These new APUs combine multi-core CPU (x86) technology, DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics, a parallel processing engine, a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block (UVD3), and a high-speed bus all in one simple little die design.

"We believe that AMD Fusion processors are, quite simply, the greatest advancement in processing since the introduction of the x86 architecture more than forty years ago," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. "In one major step, we enable users to experience HD everywhere as well as personal supercomputing capabilities in notebooks that can deliver all-day battery life. It's a new category, a new approach, and opens up exciting new experiences for consumers."

AMD's Fusion APU will be broken down into three classes: the A-series "Llano" APUs, the C-Series "Ontario" APUs, and E-Series "Zacate" APUs. The A-Series is designed for personal supercomputing featuring up to four x86 cores and a discrete DirectX 11-capable GPU. The C-Series is designed for HD netbooks and other emerging form factors whereas the E-Series is meant for mainstream notebooks, All-In-Ones, and small form factor desktops.

AMD said that its 2011 low power platform will consist of the C-Series or E-Series whereas the 2011 mainstream platform will feature the A-Series. The latter platform is expected to ship in the first half of 2011 with products hitting the market around mid-2011.

Tablets and embedded designs based on AMD Fusion APUs are expected to be available later in Q1 2011. Currently various leading manufacturers are expected to announce their Fusion APU-based products soon including, Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP and five others.

All Fusion APU-based systems are expected to offer "very compelling value and mainstream price points."

Kevin Parrish
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31 Comments Comment from the forums
  • scytherswings
    Anyone else find her voice obnoxious?
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    So its announced but when can people buy them?

    I also want to see some reviews on it and see it compared to Sandy Bridge based mobile parts, especially compared to Quick Sync and power usage. Hard to say its great without seeing it in action yet....
    Reply
  • SchizoFrog
    ''The A-Series is designed for personal supercomputing featuring up to four x86 cores...''

    I'm a little confused. Featuring only UP TO 4 cores? Is this not a step backwards as AMD already has 6 core Phenoms albeit an older architecture? Or do they mean the initial APUs at launch will feature up to 4 cores?
    Reply
  • joytech22
    schizofrog''The A-Series is designed for personal supercomputing featuring up to four x86 cores...''I'm a little confused. Featuring only UP TO 4 cores? Is this not a step backwards as AMD already has 6 core Phenoms albeit an older architecture? Or do they mean the initial APUs at launch will feature up to 4 cores?
    This isn't their high-end version, it isn't designed for super-high-end desktops, but more for cheaper, low-end low-power high-performance computing.

    Bulldozer is designed to tackle the desktop market with 4, 8 and 16 cores in the future.
    Reply
  • kcorp2003
    i heard Microsoft are might be using AMD fusion II 28nm for their next gen 2.0 consoles. Be interesting to see if they going to put in another dedicated GPU in the system too. However these Sandybridge and AMD fusion build in GPUs aren't powerfull to take on the higher end GPU on the market. I really hope Fusion 2 can be as powerful as a HD5870 specs or GTX580 specs or similar to the mobile version counterparts.
    Reply
  • @schizofrog

    if you been following you'll know that bulldozer will introduce AMD variant of hyper threading, so 4 physical cores equates to 8 virtual ones, this doesn't account for the GPU cores
    Reply
  • aznshinobi
    @kcorp2003

    It would be nice to see them at a 5870 Mobility level or 580M level but I don't see it happening since the temps would probably get very hot on the die. And in Laptops or notebooks it'd be especially hot since airflow is so poor.
    Reply
  • fstrthnu
    Unfortunately for AMD, their new marketing language will prove to be useless since the new Sandy Bridge chips would be considered APUs too... (graphics on die)
    Reply
  • stingstang
    Yea, so what I'm getting from this is that AMD just sh** a brick seeing what Sandybridge can do, and is pouring their hearts out on this thing. I'd hate to see them come up short...again.
    Reply
  • SpadeM
    hyperThreadings@schizofrogif you been following you'll know that bulldozer will introduce AMD variant of hyper threading, so 4 physical cores equates to 8 virtual ones, this doesn't account for the GPU cores
    Wrong .... bulldozer will have inside a single core two independent integer cluster, meaning that a 4 "core" bulldozer chip will look like and 8 threaded processor BUT unlike hyperthreading or SMT AMD is duplicating actual hardware inside the core.

    1 SMT'd or HT'd core can never and will never be able to compete performance wise with a true dual core, or quad and so on and so forth (if the architecture is the same) This basically means that, if with HT or SMT u get very little return in performance for your money (look at the efficiency article from yesterday in Tom's) with AMDs approach the difference in performance should be considerable given that u actually have 8 "mini" cores. How fast can they process information, what's the power requirement ... these are things that will be reveal later on this year.
    Reply