AMD has decided that while the Llano APU will be delayed, the first mobile Fusion processor will arrive sooner than anticipated. Ontario will launch in Q4 2010 and bring integrated DirectX 11 graphics to notebooks.
AMD announced that it has sped up the launch of its first Application Processing Unit (APU) of the Fusion family to Q4 2010. Ontario will debut in the mobile segment sporting 40 nanometer technology from TSMC, while Global Foundries is trying to get its 32nm SOI technology working for Llano.
AMD says that it sees bigger potential with the Fusion among mobiles, which seems very sound considering the processor architecture is pretty much the same as today. This certainly makes Ontario the best option to focus on right now.
Based on strong customer demand and and accelerated engineering cycle, we now expect Ontario to be the first fusion APU we bring to market. We plan to ship Ontario APUs in the 4th quarter of this year – ahead of schedule. Customer systems based on Ontario are planned to be available early next year.
Ontario has an integrated DX11 GPU and will go up against Intel Atom, where it should win big when it comes to graphics, but the generic performance of the chip is harder to predict.
