AMD Reference Notebook Design from Compal Exposed

AMD's recent Financial Analyst Day event exposed many things about what the company would and wouldn't be doing over the next few years, but that wasn't everything that was revealed.

It so happens that, in addition to AMD itself, Compal also made a revelation, or it might be more accurate to say that AMD revealed something made by Compal.

Put simply, the item in the pictures provided by Engadget is the reference notebook design based on AMD's Trinity APUs.

Advanced Micro Devices spent the past few years offering little, if anything, in terms of mobile PC CPU technology.

Though discrete GPUs have never been in short supply, the Sunnyvale, California-based company didn't make many mobile CPUs.

Now, though, the rise of tablets and the steady change of focus from desktops to notebooks is, one might say, forcing AMD's hand.

The Trinity APUs is the company's answer to this trend, and this laptop from Compal is one of the coveted design wins.

18 mm thick (0.70 inches), the notebook has a low-voltage quad-core APU (Piledriver cores, Radeon HD 7000M graphics).

There is also an HDMI port, USB 3.0 and a mini-DisplayPort. LightningBolt may or may not be present as well.

Compal means for final products to be priced at $500-$600 (380-456 Euro) and will start shipping this reference design to its OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners soon.

That way, the latter will know what architecture, features and performance they should seek when creating the laptops.

For those who want to know what plans the company has made for the long term, Advanced Micro Devices is accelerating the “true” fusion of x86 and GPU.

By 2014, APUs will be able to decide on their own whether to use the x86 cores or the stream processors of the Radeon GPU.

The company has also decided to cancel the 10-core and 20-core Opteron units, overall slowing down the platform progression on the server market.