AMD Says Fusion is Going to Be Unlike Everything We Have Seen Before

Advanced Micro Devices has not delivered a top-performing central processing unit since 2006. Although the company has managed to fight back the first place on the market of discrete graphics cards, its financial performance remains questionable. But there is the next - Fusion - era comes to AMD, which will have drastic influence onto the company's future. The firm thinks so.

"As AMD heads into 2011, it really is starting to feel like some historic battles between irresistible forces and unmovable objects are coming to a head. [...] For thousands of people inside the company, you can sense us rising from our seats to see what AMD Fusion is going to deliver, and we all know it is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen before," said Gary Silcott is senior manager of product PR at AMD.

Unfortunately for AMD, the first accelerated processing unit (APU) is going aim only very low-power low-end devices, such as cheap notebooks or netbooks. AMD's code-named Ontario/Zacate design sports a couple of AMD K10.5/Stars cores as well as ATI Radeon HD 5400-series graphics engine (with similar performance to 2400-series from 2007). Naturally, such a product cannot make a major market change. Moreover, given the fact of AMD's low mobile market share, it is hardly likely that Ontario/Zacate will influence the market of mobile computers. What AMD hopes on are two things: highly integrated Fusion chip will allow to shrink down size of small form-factor system (SFF) and software evolution will make use of integrated graphics core making AMD's offerings more productive compared to rivals from Intel Corp.