AMD Fusion Coming in 2011

Advanced Micro Devices has been talking about its Fusion processor for quite a while, but the company has failed to, so far, launch it. The chip is supposed to combine AMD's years' worth of CPU expertise with ATI's equally notable experience in graphics. Most recently, AMD's Marketing Director for South Asia, tan See Chee, spoke of the company's plans for the upcoming processor and the platform that would back it up.

According to AMD, the Barzos platform that will be paired with the Fusion processors will be targeted at ultra-thin notebooks. They will supposedly operate on less power than current solutions, which means that the chip and platform might be very suited for tablet PCs. This fact comes even though AMD is “currently not painting a strategy” around such devices. The Fusion APU (accelerated processing unit) will be codenamed Ontario and will integrate the CPU and GPU on a single die, similar to what Intel's 32nm CPUs do.

All APUs will be made based on the 32nm manufacturing process. They will target not just ultra-thin and ultra-mobile systems, but the line will also feature desktop PC offerings. The company will still monitor the “exciting” tablet market and will watch out for an opportune moment to enter it.

Most speculations around the APU deal with the actual graphics capabilities. Considering the extensive graphical know-how from ATI, there is little doubt that AMD should be capable of making APUs capable of running even the most modern games, even with all the difficulties of combining the two technologies into a single die. However, making such a superpowered chip might actually threaten AMD's graphics card sales. As such, while the Fusion is expected to surpass Intel's 32nm chips, a high-end graphics performance may be out of the question.

Currently, the Fusion 32nm SPU is scheduled to debut sometime during 2011.