14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the mainstream line of Fusion processors that Advanced Micro Devices has up for sale has reached something of a shipment milestone, provided recent reports are true.
As consumers probably know full well by now, Advanced Micro Devices finally brought forth the Fusion technology this year.
Essentially, Fusion chips, called APUs (accelerated processing units) instead of CPUs (central processing units), are chips with built-in DirectX 11 Radeon HD 6000-Series GPUs.
Back at the start of 2011, AMD only released entry-level chips, but this changed later, when the Llano mainstream range arrived.
It is this mainstream set of APUs that has now made the news, or at least fell under the eye of market watchers.
What the folks over at Digitimes have to report this once is that AMD managed to sell quite a few Llano chips.
The current figure stands somewhere between 1.3 million and 1.5 million, having been attained by the end of July.
Considering the fact that there are still two quarters left, it is believed that the Sunnyvale, California-based company will raise that figure to 7.5-8 million by the end of the year (2011).
One should also note that the outfit has yet to release the Zambezi, the FX, AM3+-compatible high-end units (no built-in GPU).
Scheduled for the fourth quarter, they will use the 32nm process (C and E APUs are 40nm units) and will be followed, in 2012, by the 28nm Krishna, this one intended for mini PCs and all-in-one systems.
Finally, 32nm Trinity APUs will also arise by next year, set to replace the Llano. All in all, if things work out for the CPU and GPU maker, it might continue to gain CPU market share at Intel's expense, like it already did in the second quarter.
UPDATE: Corrected sentence that erroneously classified Zambezi as a GPU-equipped Fusion chip.