AMD has — finally — shipped its first Fusion processors, years after they were first announced. Better late than never. "As of 4am Central Time, our facility in Singapore, our test and manufacturing facility, shipped the very first Fusion APUs — production units — to customers worldwide," AMD senior vice president and general …

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Tuesday 9th November 2010 21:11 GMT Giles Jones

Late to the party

It might be a first for the desktop/laptop market but for handhelds there are chips that do pretty much everything in one chip.

It's amazing the desktop market is so slow to catch up, it's obviously going to work better if you can cut out a lot of slow external buses.

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1. Tuesday 9th November 2010 23:41 GMT Charles Manning
  
  Should help power
  
  External buses require quite a bit of power to drive the buses. Keeping these on-chip gets rid of a lot of power consumption. Pin-count and package count is reduced which should cut down on cost.
  
  Might end up being good for those all-in-one systems and lower end desk/lap tops.
  
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2. Wednesday 10th November 2010 10:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Big difference
  
  System on a chips are not even close in terms of raw power as these little buggers. They tend to be a average processors with shitty little graphics power. If I'm not wrong, these are decent* processors combined with decent* graphics. If memory serves me correctly, they will be able to hook up with "external" cards and massively improve performace.
  
  *Decent = what 99% of people will be happy with.
  
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  1. Wednesday 10th November 2010 16:03 GMT Nigel 11
    
    Netbook on a chip?
    
    9W, 18W is netbook territory. If they signifcantly outperform Intel's Atoms (especially on graphics) then they might be the key to getting acceptable performance on a Netbook running Windows 7.
    
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Tuesday 9th November 2010 23:41 GMT Daniel B.

Zacate?

That's one word for 'grass' in Mexican Spanish. Should I keep my APU out of reach from my lawnmowwer, then?

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1. Wednesday 10th November 2010 10:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Slang
  
  "Grass" has other meanings; will the rozzers be interested??
  
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2. Wednesday 10th November 2010 10:24 GMT TeeCee
  
  Re: Zacate?
  
  Hmm, makes you wonder just what they were smoking when they came up with these names.....
  
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  1. Wednesday 10th November 2010 11:40 GMT Andy Miller
    
    I don't talk to no sticking grasses....
    
    Maybe it keeps Foggy Bottom informed of your activities?
    
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Wednesday 10th November 2010 10:05 GMT The Nameless Mist

APU

what .. they've got an Armored Personnel Unit built in?

WOW! I'm impressed.

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Wednesday 10th November 2010 10:05 GMT GoFasterStripes

Oh yeah?

Oh, so ARM isn't going to take over this year either? Boo...

Best of luck to AMD though.

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Wednesday 10th November 2010 15:57 GMT DRendar

HTPCs

These would be ideal for use is low-power, small size HTPCs

Well... they *would* if AMD/ATI pulled their fucking thumbs out of their arses and released a driver with access to an HD decoding API. (that actually works)

NVIDIA released VDPAU donkeys ago and within WEEKS the Open Source community was able to use it.

More than a year after AMD release VAAPI and it still produces hundreds of rendering bugs - making it as useful as a chocolate teapot.

My HTPC running XBMC at home can decode a 1080p x264 MKV with the 1.8Ghz single core CPU bimbling along at about 5% utilisation. The heavy lifting is offloaded through the VDPAU API to a fanless GeForce 9400, which cost me about 30quid over a year ago.

I've yet to hear of anyone who's got hardware accelerated video decoding working reliably on ATI GFX hardware in Linux/BSD

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