14 DAY TRIAL // Talk about AMD's Fusion has not been lacking, and it looks like an actual confrontation between it and Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs might finally be shaping up, provided a recent report is valid.
AMD may have managed to get some profits during the first quarter of 2011, but it was nowhere near Intel's performance.
The main reason for this is that, while the Fusion platform has been getting recognized, it is, at the moment, still mostly confined to the low-end laptop and tablet markets.
In other words, the Ontario and Zacate APUs aren't really capable of challenging the Santa Clara, California-based company's Sandy Bridge units.
Once the Llano mainstream Fusion chip finally starts selling in a serious fashion, however, AMD will finally have something to push on the mainstream PC front.
It helps that 28nm chips have already begun to be taped out, as this can only mean that end-users won't have to wait too long for the showdown to start.
Granted, with Intel's existing hold on the market, no massive change in share is expected, but a certain report still expects AMD to be able to increase its CPU share form the roughly 20% of now to around 30%.
MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS and other companies have already expressed their decision to provide motherboards for the Llano APU.
All in all, market sources behind the aforementioned report seem to think that llano will end up accounting for 40% of AMD's total CPU sales during the third quarter.
In numbers, this means that Advanced Micro Devices intends to ship 3 million of those chips during the July-September period.
Predictably, the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU, APU and GPU maker did not comment on the rumor. Still, with DirectX 11 graphics and decent core clocks, Llano does seem poised to become a worthy opponent to Intel's second generation of Core chips.