AMD says Fusion chips to bring "new era of computing"

AMD says that its Fusion line of computer processors represent a "new era of computing".

The processors combine general computing and graphics processing capabilities onto a single 'die' and have been in development since 2006.

At the Computex trade show in Taipei today AMD's senior vice president Rick Bergman told a press conference that more powerful chips were to come. The company started releasing its Fusion processors in January with the C-series and E-series 'Brazos' chips designed for low-power applications such as netbook computers.

Those processors, direct competitors to Intel's popular Atom chips, have sold more than five million in the five months they have been available, according to Chris Cloran, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager of the firm's Computing Solutions group.

Mr Bergman said that the long-awaited mainstream Llano processors for desktop computers would be released "in a couple of weeks". While many industry watchers had been expecting the company to annouce Llano availability, instead Mr Bergman declared that AMD was "done with Llano. We're bus working on the next great thing," which took the form of a brand new Z-series Fusion processor line.

The Z-series will be a collection of very-low power processors designed for tablet computers running Windows 7.

Some of AMD's partners demonstrated coming products using Fusion chips at the show. Henry Lu of MSI said of the MSI Windpad 110 (pictured above) "it couldn't be better", while Lenovo showed off its E125 laptop for small-business users, which will build on the company's X120 model but have a full-size keyboard and run Windows 7 Professional.

A representative from Acer displayed the company's Iconia Tab W500 tablet running Windows - click here to read our recent review of that model.

The AMD press conference was part of the Computex Taipei 2011 trade show. To read all of our reporters' coverage from Taiwan, click here.