AMD has proclaimed that its energy efficient Bobcat microarchitecture will be capable of power consumptions down to under 1 watt and now the company is starting to eye Google’s mobile platform Android. The goal is to evaluate whether the operating system would fit for Fusion-based tablets.
The energy efficeint Brazos platform from AMD have already taken its first stumbling steps on the tablet market where system builder Acer has presented a tablet, Aspire 5745G, with an extra efficient model of the Fusion APU. With dual cores and 1GHz clock frequency AMD C-50 consumes at most 5 watt, which is about half of the regular AMD C processors of the Fusion family.
While AMD continues to make its Fusion APUs more efficient it has started investigating potential software platforms and after Nokia jumped on Windows Phone 7 together with Microsoft it has more or less given up on MeeGo.
Microsoft’s x86 Windows operating system is still the primary choice for AMD, Acer developed its tablet for Windows 7, where it can use the integrated DirectX 11 GPU inside the Fusion APU. At the same time it will start investigating the open Android platform. Cheap Android tablets still exist, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A line is one of the most prominent (and long-running) proponents of such products.
“As we look onto open-standards market, the Android certainly makes a tremendous amount of sense. That is something we will be investigating as we take our Fusion architecture [into new markets] and we are able to create versions of this architecture for lower power environments that would work quite well for, perhaps, a tablet using this operating system,” says Neal Robinson from AMD in an interview with X-bit Labs
We don’t expect any major AMD offensive among tablets in 2011, but when it launches its second generation Fusion processors next year with more efficient 28nm technology with greater possibilities to lower power consumption, which is perfect for ultramobile devices like tablets where the ARM architecture has a great advantage.
Motorola Xoom with Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” powered by an ARM-based processor
