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.
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