AMD Fusion APUs Arrive

As expected, AMD officially launched its Fusion APU platform today, the day before the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, just in time to counter Intel’s Sandy Bridge barrage. The press release announcing AMD Fusion APU Era Begins lauds the graphics portion of its APU, which has…

* DirectX 11-capable graphics
* Massive parallel processing to speed application performance
* The UVD3 video acceleration block found in the new AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Series GPUs

Gigabyte preceded AMD’s announcement yesterday in unveiling the E-350 APU (Zacate) powered GA-E350N-USB3 mini-ITX all-in-one motherboard. This is obviously aimed at the base of the pyramid, unlike the Intel i5-2500K we posted our examination of 36 hours ago, but the new AMD APUs look like they have the potential to transform the sector. We expect a lively heating up of rivalry between the industry’s biggest processor companies this CES. * Discuss this news in the SPCR forums. *

As expected, AMD officially launched its Fusion APU platform today, the day before the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, just in time to counter Intel’s Sandy Bridge barrage. The press release announcing AMD Fusion APU Era Begins lauds the graphics portion of its APU, which has…

* DirectX 11-capable graphics
* Massive parallel processing to speed application performance
* The UVD3 video acceleration block found in the new AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 Series GPUs

Gigabyte preceded AMD’s announcement yesterday in unveiling the E-350 APU (Zacate) powered GA-E350N-USB3 mini-ITX all-in-one motherboard. This is obviously aimed at the base of the pyramid, unlike the Intel i5-2500K we posted our examination of 36 hours ago, but the new AMD APUs look like they have the potential to transform the sector. We expect a lively heating up of rivalry between the industry’s biggest processor companies this CES. * Discuss this news in the SPCR forums. *