AMD 'Llano' Fusion APU Shipping in systems this quarter

[caveman-jim]

As part of the commentary surrounding AMD's surprise Press Release this week, AMD have commented on the various articles around the web and disclosed that the new 32nm Fusion APU codenamed 'Llano' is shipping for revenue in this quarter. EDIT - AMD have now released an official Blog entry for the status of the A-series APU's.

The story began with a press release on Sunday, where AMD announced a change in their wafer supply agreement with GLOBALFOUNDRIES. This was followed up by a very early morning briefing with Financial journalists this morning, to clarify the situation.

The end result appears to be that ATIC, the company that has large investments in both companies, is helping each company play ball to both of their benefits - in the long term. Short term this helps AMD, and next year GloFo gets the cherry syrup bottle back again.

As part of the commentary and responses to questions from interested journalists, AMD confirmed that the new Fusion APU will be available this quarter. Llano is built upon existing x86 microarchitecture, currently found in the 45nm Athlon II processors, codenamed Propus cores. This core design was presumably tweaked and moved to GloFo's new 32nm process and a nice fat SIMD array integrated into the die.

The SIMD array also includes AMD Radeon uncore parts, such as the UVD3 hardware. Rumored to be available in two to four x86 core variants with up to 5 VLIW-5 SIMD's, the new Fusion APU is aimed for the mainstream desktop to deliver massive parallel compute capabilties, excellent media consumption and creation abilities, as well as DirectX 11 graphics power.

Check out the coverage from Semiaccurate and Hexus.

AMD Fusion Blog:

Production units of AMD’s 32 nanometer quad-core “Llano” A-Series Accelerated Processor Units (APU) with discrete-level graphics are now shipping.

When we say we are shipping production units of any part for the first time, the next question I inevitably get asked is how does AMD define “production”? Fortunately, much like the title of this blog, the answer is simple. When we talk about production here at AMD, it refers to the units that will ultimately be in the systems that our OEM partners will ship to retailers or end-customers.

Chief Financial Officer and Interim CEO Thomas Seifert mentioned on his Webcast today, “Customers are very excited about Llano coming to market and we will look forward to seeing our “Llano”-based systems in the market this quarter — the second quarter.”

More information about systems based on AMD A-Series APUs will be available when we launch the “Llano” APU later this quarter.

Read the full blog here.

[graphicnoob]

Caveman,

I have not seen much information on this in the recent months since i first saw this post before joining the forum. any update on what's going on? This information is going to be very helpful for my email marketingcampaigns I like to run with Rage3D compatibility, so any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks homie!

[caveman-jim]

We have an article in the works right now that explains more about the technology, performance testing, and the launch of the two platforms (notebooks are codenamed sabine, desktops are codenamed lynx).

The Fusion APU's for mainstream use are the A-series APU's, and are branded A4, A6, A8 and a 4-digit relative performance numbers. The A2's are dual cores, the A6's and A8's are quad cores.

Inside, the GPU's feature VLIW-5 architecture SIMD's, between 3 and 5, at different clock speeds. Advanced power gating on the CPU and GPU lower idle power and the mobility processors feature Turbo CORE technology for the CPU cores. The GPU's are powerful, branded Radeon HD 6xxxG for mobility APU's and HD 6xxxD for desktop APU's. They support Dual Graphics - crossfire with a discrete GPU in the system, of similar type.

We have a new forum, where we discuss the APU, here.