AMD Ships Llano APU, Second Wave of Fusion Is Go

Earlier this year, we gave you a taste or two of what AMD's new Fusion APU-based Brazos platform has in store for notebooks and netbooks.  We've since then followed-up with a review of retail shipping product and as we reported, we were genuinely impressed yet at again at what AMD's budding Fusion line-up had to offer.  These low power devices were all well and good, as they say, for those of you looking for something in an ultralight mobile platform, but what about something with a bit more muscle -- say in a quad-core variant perhaps?  It appears we're going to see what AMD is packin' in this area very soon.  Today in a blog post, AMD confirmed that their Llano APU is indeed shipping to system builders and OEM partners.  The A-Series "Llano" is go, according to the AMD Public Relations team...

"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.

Now of course, I can’t speak for exactly when each of our OEM partners will ship systems, that’s a question for them, but as our 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.”

32nm Llano "Fusion" APU Running Alien vs Predator - 10/2010

And so it appears, Sandy Bridge, in both the notebook and the desktop space has real competition now.  The good news is we'll see product (and you'll see product evaluations here) in the next couple of months.  It will be very interesting to see what the stats look like when we get our hands on a Llano-powered machine but what we've seen thus far of the new midrange chip, is more than promising.  AMD has won their share of design wins with Zacate and their Brazos platform for thin-and-light notebooks.  Hopefully with this Fusion release, AMD will give Intel something to sweat, that should appeal customers in the mainstream that care about balanced computing with reasonably good multimedia muscle behind it.