Mar 24, 2011 20:01 GMT  ·  By

Just when we though that we had a firm date for Llano's release and that everything is gearing up for a July launch, a semiconductor analyst at financial consultants Sterne Agee comes forward to claim that the company will actually start to ship its second generation Fusion APU to major PC vendors, including HP and Acer, as early as April.

This comes to contradict everything we knew until now as all of AMD's roadmaps and various reports that reached the Web pointed out to a July launch, which would mean that shipping would start sometime in mid or late June.

Nevertheless, Sterne Agee has issued a buy recommendation for AMD shares, based on Vijay Rakesh's claims that the first laptops running AMD's Llano chips will arrive in the US in the second quarter of the year.

In addition, Rakesh also said that Bulldozer would be launched in the third quarter of 2011, contrary to all the rumors available until now that point at a late Q2 release.

It goes without saying that all these claims should be taken with a grain of salt, since AMD didn't release any information regarding the release dates of the two chips.

AMD's Llano APUs are designed so that they would replace the present-day Phenom II and Athlon II processors in the company's product line and are destined to be used in performance notebooks and in mid-range desktop systems.

The chips use the same Stars architecture as that of AMD's current processors, but pair it with an on-die graphics core that is based on the AMD Radeon HD 6000-series GPU architecture.

In addition, the chips will also feature an integrated dual-channel memory controller that supports speeds up to 1866MHz and an integrated PCI Express Gen 2.0 controller.

The chips will be built using the 32nm manufacturing process and AMD says they will offer better multitasking experience than Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs. (via VR-Zone)