Intel and AMD took two completely different approaches when it came to launching their latest and greatest chips: Intel kicked off Ivy Bridge by launching its most powerful desktop units first, while AMD's Trinity APUs first popped up on notebooks. In fact, you still can't find a desktop Trinity chip -- but the company recently confirmed with HardwareCanucks that Trinity is on schedule to ship to component channels some time later this year and a full listing of the desktop APUs are up on the AMD website.
Enhanced energy efficiency, a decent CPU gain and big improvement on the graphics front: no, we're not talking about Ivy Bridge, we're talking about AMD's second-generation A-Series Fusion APU, Trinity. And why are we talking about Trinity, you ask? Because it officially launched today, that's why. Well, kinda -- only laptop and "ultrathin notebook" Trinity APUs are hitting the streets any time soon.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) managed to beat Intel's Ivy Bridge to the launch-day punch on a technicality when the Santa Clara chip maker 
Throughout the years, AMD's strategy against Intel has been to undercut the Santa Clara chip maker in price, though that's not necessarily by design. Clock for clock, AMD's processors don't usually pack the same performance punch as Intel's silicon, and that's especially true with the launch of Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture. In response to Ivy Bridge, AMD decided another round of price cuts was in order.
If AMD were an Internet troll, it would be that annoying guy who always chimes in with a "FIRST!" post in the comment sections of articles. After the company's Radeon 7000 series beat Nvidia to market by quite a few months, it's now beaten Intel to the CPU punch, too. With Ivy Bridge's expected launch staring us square in the face, AMD has announced that its Trinity and Brazos 2.0 APUs have begun shipping out.
High powered procs may get all the attention, but slapping a Sandy Bridge-E chip into a budget build is akin to slapping a fly with a sledgehammer -- it's just way too much firepower for the job. For folks looking to get their secondary (or tertiary) PC on, AMD is releasing a new low-cost Llano APU designed to fit nicely into the FM1 socket.
A Chinese website posted details about six upcoming AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) built around the chip maker's Trinity architecture. These include a pair of dual-core processors and four quad-core parts with improved graphics. Half of the new lineup will ship with a Black Edition label, a designation reserved for processors with unlocked multipliers.
They say two heads are better than one, but in processors with integrated graphics -- think Intel's Sandy Bridge or AMD's APUs -- the GPU and CPU actually do very little communicating. For the most part, the GPU does its thing while the CPU knocks about on something else. There has to be something better! And as it turns out, there is: a group of researchers from North Carolina State University recently coaxed CPUs and GPUs on integrated processors into helping each other out, and they report a performance boost of over 20 percent as a result.
AMD won't be popping open any champagne bottles to celebrate 2011, during which time the Santa Clara chip maker pulled in $6.57 billion in revenue, falling flat year-over-year. Revenue also fell flat sequentially at $1.69 billion, representing a net loss of $177 million, or $0.24 per share, along with operating income of $71 million. But all things considered, it could have been much worse.
Coming up with new and hip brand names isn’t an easy task, that is unless you take the easy road and just stuck “I” in front of everything. For those most part these days marketing departments are finding all the reasonably catchy buzz words have been snatched up, and much to the surprise of AMD, so was Fusion. 
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