CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs

When it comes to netbooks and small form factor PC’s Intel really has taken over. The Atom chip really made things affordable and gave netbooks enough power to do basic tasks. At CES 2011 AMD announced its Fusion Family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). These chips have a single die design with multi-core CPU technology, powerful DirectX 11 discrete level graphics and a dedicated high-definition video acceleration block. AMD sat down with us and discussed their new Fusion APU’s and what products we can expect to see with a Fusion APUs in them.

The AMD Fusion Family of APUs

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There are 3 different series of APUs in the Fusion family. Here is some information on each…

– AMD E-Series APU (formerly codenamed “Zacate”) – an 18-watt TDP APU for ultrathin, mainstream and value notebooks as well as desktops and all-in-ones. The E-Series includes the E-350 (dual-core 1.6GHz) and E-240 (single core 1.5GHz).

– AMD C-Series APU (formerly codenamed “Ontario”) – a 9-watt APU for HD netbooks and small form factor desktops and devices such as tablets. The C-Series includes the C-50 (dual-core 1.0GHz) and C-30 (single core 1.2GHz).

– AMD A-Series APU (32nm) (formerly codenamed “Llano”) – includes up to four x86 cores and is primarily intended for performance and mainstream notebooks and mainstream desktops. The A-Series APUs are scheduled to ship in the first half of 2011 and appear in products mid-year.

E-Series & C-Series Performance Comparisons

CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs

As you can see the E-Series is taking aim at Intel’s P6000 and the C-Series at Atom. AMD promises “all day” battery life saying notebooks should get 10 hours of battery life while idle and 5 hours when in use. If they can provide that battery life and better performance than the Atom netbook’s we have looked at then they definitely have a good thing going for them.

AMD Fusion APU Products
So what type of products can we expect to see based on AMD’s Fusion APUs? They had quite a lot of display, here are just a few…

CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs CES 2011: AMD’s Fusion APUs

So as you can see not only notebooks and netbooks will use the fusion APU’s, but also Mini-ITX boards as well. Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba all had Fusion-based laptops and netbooks on display at AMD’s booth. Expect to see a flurry of Fusion-based products arriving very soon!

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