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AMD started shipping its "Llano" Accelerated Processor Units (APUs) to OEMs back in April, and now the new parts are officially out. The Sunnyvale chip maker announced what it's calling the Fusion A-Series, which AMD says "enable brilliant graphics, supercomputer-like performance, and all day battery life." These 32nm APUs are a different class of chips than the APUs that are already available, and take aim at consumer notebooks and desktops.
"The AMD A-Series APU represents an inflection point for AMD and is perhaps the industry’s biggest architectural change since the invention of the microprocessor," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. "It heralds the arrival of brilliant all-new computing experiences, and enables unprecedented graphics and video performance in notebooks and PCs. Beginning today we are bringing discrete-class graphics to the mainstream."
AMD's A-Series APUs are shipping now and will appear in more than 150 notebooks and desktops from leading OEMs throughout the second quarter of 2011 and beyond, AMD says. AMD promises up to 10.5 hours of battery life, DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics up to 400 Radeon cores along with dedicated HD video processing on a single chip, stereoscopic 3D support, up to 4MB of cache, clockspeeds up to 1.9GHz (2.5GHz Turbo), and USB 3.0 support.
Image Credit: AMD
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Keith E. Whisman
June 14, 2011 at 2:20pm
How about a system with a bulldozer CPU and a Fusion chip setup that will use the APU for low power work like web browsing and office work. Then when you want to game the APU shuts down and the Bulldozer and the GPU power up for gaming and heavy duty work.
PCLinuxguy
June 14, 2011 at 10:26pm
that actually would be an interesting build. dual cpu socket motherboards do exist but are expensive ( as far as I know) and not easy to ick up off the shelf. The main problem would be the bios making them work together. Granted Nvidia's optimus technology that uses dual graphics for low and higher end work seems to operate just fine, I'm not sure how well that would also work with ading a second brain to the system. the other problem if such worked, would be lag time in switching between the bulldozer/GPU and just the apu. I also mostly see that for mid to full sized desktops. The only better solution would be to have a gaming rig for everything or a console of some sort for gaming and have a fusion chipped net top or mid size desktop.
Neufeldt2002
June 14, 2011 at 7:55am
Ok, now that the marketing people have had their say, what are the actual numbers performance wise.
gruvsf
June 14, 2011 at 1:29pm
Some early benchmarks by people who have access to the new Llano chips: http://hardwareinsights.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=298
