AMD has just officially announced the launch of its new processor chips for laptops. Codenamed "Llano", the official name of the chip is the AMD Fusion A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit. This is the second product from AMD that will use its new Fusion design that combines both CPU and GPU processors on one chip. While the first Fusion chips launched last January were designed for low powered laptops, these new Fusion-A chips are much more powerful and designed for more mainstream laptop use.
According to AMD's press release, "the AMD A-Series APUs combine up to four x86 CPU cores with powerful DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics and up to 400 Radeon cores along with dedicated HD video processing on a single chip." AMD claims that even though the chip has a lot of processing power, it will also allow laptops to extend its battery life up to 10.5 hours. AMD also says, "HD video is crystal clear through dedicated video playback technology and dynamic post-processing, and websites render faster with accelerated HTML5 and Direct2D performance." The Fusion-A chip can also be used with a discreet AMD Radeon graphics card to boost graphics performance by 75 percent.
AMD said that up to 150 notebooks and desktop PCs with the new Fusion-A chips will ship by the end of the second quarter of 2011. VentureBeat reports that HP will release 11 laptops with AMD's new chip with prices that start at $399. Toshiba will also launch several laptops with AMD's chip as well.
Comments (6)
Reply10.5 Hrs battery life seems unusually attractive.
I wonder how much of that is left after the screen and other components start tearing at it.
Similar to the issue the Atom has/had the processor is energy efficient compared to other Intels but the other components use the lions share of the power. Overall its still a less energy hungry package though, not sure about newer designs
Can't wait to see it in a Lenovo Thinkpad series laptop, since these are th only types we use at the office.
reviews have shown that the battery life is lower than the quad core sandy bridge, their 10.5hrs only works with 40% screen brightness btw. Never trust manufacturer's own benchmarks!
well to be fair it says "up to" 10.5 hours.. so that would mean using the least amout of power possible and the screen turned down all the way..
hmmm, I wonder how it will differ from the E-350 Zacate, and when it will be available in a low wattage ITX board
by differ I mean clock speed wise, or will it just stay at 1.6ghz and slap on more cores, Im fairly excited to see that they are going quad core on this