14 DAY TRIAL // Sometime in the upcoming months, AMD plans to introduce its second generation of Fusion chips, code named Llano, recent reports suggesting that the APUs are on track for being released in the second quarter of the year, if everything goes as planned.
Although no official announcement regarding the release schedule of the first Llano processors have been made, SemiAccurate reports that “things are looking up for a Q2 Llano introduction.”
According to the same website, GlobalFoundries has managed to overcome the biggest hurdles that it faced with its HKMG 32nm SOI manufacturing process, paving the way for mass producing AMD's upcoming chip.
GlobalFoundries is the world's third largest semiconductor foundry and has been created by spinning off AMD's chip manufacturing capabilities in early 2009.
Its HKMG 32nm SOI fabrication process is supposed to be one of the most advanced in the industry, as it resolvers the leakage problems derived from shrinking the chip manufacturing nodes.
The technology can even lead to a tenfold decrease in leakage, delivering improved thermal characteristics and energy efficiency.
This is a key technology for the upcoming Llano series of processors as their launch greatly depends on the success of the process.
Llano CPUs are designed in order to replace the Athlon II in the desktop space and will also make their entrance in the mainstream and performance notebook market.
Compared to the company's first Fusion chips, Llano has an improved DirectX 11 GPU that contains no less than six SIMD engines, each with 80 stream processors, early performance numbers placing it in the same boat with Intel's Core i3 540, although it features much better graphics.
In addition to the on-die Radeon GPU, the APU packs a dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory controller and 1MB L2 cache per core as well as a PCI Express 2.0 controller.