Why You Should Love APUs This Valentine's Day

[caveman-jim]

Leslie Sobon, AMD's Corporate Vice President, product and outbound marketing, has posted a fun blog about why you should love AMD's Accelerated Processing Unit this Valentines Day:

It began at CES in Las Vegas, then to Taipei and Singapore, now Bangalore and Sydney, soon Hong Kong and Beijing, and finally Europe.

It’s the AMD Fusion “I Heart APU” Road Trip 2011 – coming soon to a city near you!

As I’ve been telling folks during the tour, remember 2011. Because this year marks the most significant advancement for PC, tablet and embedded devices since, well, since the Bee Gees discovered disco. And that was a looong time ago.

And, as I’ve been traipsing around the world on this virtual tour bus, I’ve compiled my favorite reasons to “heart” AMD Fusion APU.

• Packed into the size of about a U.S. penny are two 64-bit processors, a discrete-level GPU with DirectX-11 capable graphics, a parallel processing engine, and a dedicated video block for encoding/decoding. And that’s just our low-power APU.
• And that same low power APU has 90 gigaflops of compute capability. That’s more computing power than the Core i7 2600 (“Sandybridge”).
• Big sister APU – codenamed “Llano” – will offer over 500 gigaflops of compute capability. That’s 260 times the processing power of the Cray-2 supercomputer in the mid-80s.
• And it has loads more computing capability than a typical CPU of just two years ago.
• Every APU offers AMD AllDay™ power – so notebooks powered by these APUs will offer up to 10+ hours of battery life.*
• You can build really fun stuff with it. Just look at the projector Ed Callway, AMD’s resident ‘modder’and all around mega-geek, built with an APU.
• The low power APU requires less power than a compact fluorescent light bulb – making it a great product for the $3 billion x86 embedded market, powering everything from TVs and set top boxes to casino gambling and medical imaging machines.
• The low power APU requires less power than a compact fluorescent light bulb – making it a great product for the $3 billion x86 embedded market, powering everything from TVs and set top boxes to casino gambling and medical imaging machines.
• Not only does it build cool form factors, but it’s cool to the touch. Check out our thermal video comparing our 9-watt APU to Atom.
• You can find AMD’s little APU in the most beautiful notebooks. My current, personal favorite is the Sony VAIO™ YB in bright pink. All it needs is a Hello Kitty sticker.

Why such a leap forward?

Because the compute capability in the AMD APU is the key to unlocking the next generation high tech experience. It’s the way we get to seamless video search through facial recognition, and voice recognition, and more intuitive interfaces. It’s the way computers get smarter – truly smarter. And it can only do that with the increased gigaflops and compute power contained within both x86 CPUs and discrete GPUs.

Without it, we’ll all be like Scotty – talking into our mouse waiting for a reply.

That’s why I Heart APU!

AMD Blog

[noko]

So where are the E-350 notebooks? I can get a E-240 (single core) for $349 at BestBuy, $399 at Walmart with a smaller hard drive, still rather nice too being a Tosiba. The E-350 version is only available at FutureShop in Canada. A single core 1.5ghz is not sufficient for me. Brag about something that is not too available seems somewhat foolish too. Now when will Llano come out? Once again speaking lip with not much to show for it.

[caveman-jim]

They sold out before you could get one. Sorry.

[aop]

Yeah, E-350 based products are pretty much MIA so AMD better STFU when it comes to promoting their products superiorty over Intel.

I've been waiting Fusion for ages and not it's 1,5 month since "launch" and nothing is avaible yet!

[caveman-jim]

logic fail

[Greasy]

logic fail

Sounds more like estimated market demand fail to me. Assuming the sold out so fast.

[noko]

They sold out before you could get one. Sorry.

Not so quick, most folks, retailers, online etc. never had them. Anyways availability updates etc. would help. Llano when? If one is going to talk about it then one needs to let say inform folks in when and not string them along.

[madyasiwi]

Plenty of availability in South East Asia. I've seen at least some products from Acer, Sony, Toshiba. I guess the notebook makers thinks they're most suitable for markets in the developing countries due to the low price.

They sold out before you could get one. Sorry.

[noko]

Thats it, I expect a rather low price, otherwise it would be better to spend $100-$200 more for a substantially more powerful laptop. Still the E-350 has a few things I really like, very low power which should mean great battery life and very cool. I really like the Toshiba notebook just the E240 is not enough.