14 DAY TRIAL // While AMD seems to think its efforts on the mobile front may not seriously pay off until 2012, it seems that its Fusion APUs meant for the laptop market have, in fact, already started to ship to PC makers.
As end-users may or may not know by now, the Fusion architecture form Advanced Micro Devices has been years in the making.
After many delays, AMD has finally put together chips with multiple CPU cores and on-die graphics, said GPU even supporting DirectX 11.
Of course, the Sunnyvale, California-based chip maker will release both desktop and laptop APUs (accelerated processing units).
Now that NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 580, AMD, of course, took the time to try and distract attention from it by making some revelations of its own.
One of them is that the Ontario and Zacate APUs have already started to ship, which implies that, indeed, the chips will show up in products without any extra delays.
“As of 4 am Central Time, our facility in Singapore, our test and manufacturing facility, shipped the very first Fusion APUs - production units - to customers worldwide," said AMD senior vice president and general manager Rick Bergman.
"So it's no longer the dream. The Fusion era has truly arrived for AMD, our customers, and end users out there that really want that full HD, graphical experience that we've been promising for a couple of years now," he added.
Ontario is a single-core processor with a maximum TDP (thermal design power) of 9W, while the Zacate is a dual-core unit with a power draw of up to 18W.
The first batch of notebooks powered by these two are slated to appear early next year, during the first quarter.
Details on the processors may be found here and it is interesting to note that their maker already has the 2012 roadmap, including the Wichita and Krishna APUs, planned out.