14 DAY TRIAL // AMD may or may not be sharply changing its CPU direction, but its APUs, at least, aren't going anywhere, or it would be more accurate to say its future APUs aren't going to reconsider their arrival.
Based on a recent report on the matter, the “Trinity” accelerated processing units, the ones designed for desktop personal computers, will reach the market in March, 2012.
The A-Series with a thermal design power of 65W will come first, in early and middle March.
After that, in May, the company wants to start mass producing the higher-end models, the ones of 100W or more.
No official comment was made, but that is hardly surprising, since none of this is supposed to be public knowledge, officially anyway.
The A10-5700, A8-5500, A6-5400 and A4-5300 will have the 65W thermal envelope, leaving the A10-5800 and A8-5600 as the stronger, 100W chips.
Trinity will have Piledriver cores that should be up to 20% stronger than the Husky x86 from the existing Llano units.
The processors might also be more widely available than Llano were when they started off, because of improved 32nm yields.
If anything, this shows that Advanced Micro Devices isn't, in fact, backing out of the processor market.
Though it did, not long ago, say it was no longer going to compete with Intel, the web more or less blew those few words somewhat out of proportion.
By what we have seen so far, AMD isn't actually exiting the x86 market (as was noted here).
It looks more like it won't keep trying to actually best the Santa Clara giant on the high-end front.
AMD hasn't stepped forth to speak on the matter, but it does have a strategy update planned for February, 2012.
The Fusion platform, at the very least, will go on existing and improving over the next few years.