Acer Said to Develop Tablets Powered by AMD Z-Series APUs

Only a week after AMD officially introduced the Z-series tablet APU, manufacturers are already lining up to use these chips inside new slate designs and a recent report claims that Acer, the world's third largest PC maker, is also interested in building such devices.

According to the DigiTimes publication, the company has placed an order for 80,000 Z-series accelerated processing units, which are going to be used in an upcoming enterprise tablet design.

This report cites sources form upstream component makers, but both Acer and AMD refused to confirm the order.

If Acer does indeed intend to build a tablet based on AMD's Z-series APU, the company could become the second major hardware maker to launch such a device after MSI, who presented the MSI Windpad 110W at the Computex 2011 fair.

This uses a 10-inch touchscreen, runs the Windows 7 Professional operating system and will hit retail soon for about $599.

Outside of Acer and MSI, other vendors have already started inquiring about AMD's Z-series APUs, and AMD expects the chip to ship in at least 500,000 units in the second half of 2011.

The first Z-series accelerated processing unit to be released by AMD is called the Z-01 and is based on the company's Ontario C-50 chip.

Both processors feature a pair of 1GHz Bobcat cores as well as a Radeon HD 6250 integrated graphics core that is run at 276MHz and can fully accelerate Full HD video playback.

The Z-01 design does, however, feature some changes meant to improve the power consumption of the chips, and, as a result, its TDP has been lowered from 9W, in the Ontario APU, to 5.9W.

The AMD Z-01 tablet accelerated processing unit is shipping in volumes as we speak.