Apple to Go For 28nm AMD Fusion APUs, Sources Confirm

The world of technology is a rapidly-evolving place, where everything can change fairly quickly, with the biggest players on the market adopting all sorts of new solutions that will boost their products' level of performance, some of these movements seeming quite unlikely at start, at least for those familiar with a certain company's products and history.

Notably, one of the largest such “switches” was Apple's decision to end its long-standing partnership with IBM a few years ago and go for Intel CPUs, which provided a far superior level of performance, both on long and short-term.

And we haven't mentioned Apple for nothing here, since it would seem that the company from Cupertino, California might actually make yet another interesting move of this type on the future, establishing a partnership with Intel's arch-nemesis in the field of CPUs (yeah, we're talking about AMD here).

So, as Fudzilla reports, it seems that earlier talk about the possible integration of AMD Fusion APUs (accelerated processing units) into certain future products might actually be quite true, according to trusted industry sources close to the matter.

Those of you who're not particularly familiar with this term should know that APUs combine high-performance serial and parallel processing cores with other special-purpose hardware accelerators, enabling breakthroughs in visual computing, security, performance-per-watt and device form factor, as well as delivering CPU and GPU capabilities for HD, 3D and data-intensive workloads in a single-die processor.

The industry sources quoted by Fudzilla seem to indicate that Apple is particularly interested in 28nm and 32nm Fusion APU models (Krishna, in particular), the Cupertino company planning to release MacBook notebooks built on these next-gen chips from AMD (the iPad is out of the question, since Apple's well covered in that field).

The time when such a deal will be announced is not yet known, but presumably, it will occur at some point over the course of 2011.

Naturally, since we're talking about statements made by “industry sources” for the time being, you should take this with the mandatory grain of salt, but you'll have to admit that the idea of an Apple product running on an AMD Fusion APU does tingle one's imagination the right way.