AMD shows off its Fusion APU

AMD’s Fusion APU looks like a monster. Its future CPUs due in the first half of 2011 feature not only the traditional CPU but also a multi-functional graphics chip built in as well.
AMD showed off its “upcoming low power APU”, which is destined for normal and ultra-thin notebooks, with a demo of the latest DirectX 11 “Aliens vs Preditor” game running, with all the graphical wizardry turned up to, well, 11.
The frame rate in the realtime demo was evidently just smooth enough as the character roamed around the open environment.
It puts AMD Fusion in direct competition with Intel’s future Sandy Bridge CPU, given it demonstrated a very similar game running on its own next generation “monolithic 1.12Bn transistor” CPU-GPU only a few days ago.

AMD also demonstrated its APU acceleration in a future version of Internet Explorer 9 which includes significant GPU acceleration, offering some a 25x performance increase from a lazy 2FPS to 50FPS on graphically intensive webpages.
AMD confirmed its APUs are aimed at the mainstream market and are designed to give good battery life and the ‘full HD PC experience’.
Quite rightly, AMD explained ‘No consumer needs to open their excel spreadsheet faster’ and ‘No one knows what processor is in their TV’ as it continued to push its Vision product branding, focusing on the consumption of media over the more traditional “CPU cores and MHz” selling point of processors.
Finally, to push its upcoming Fusion APU products further, AMD announced its Fusion Fund Program, that will directly invest in hardware and software startup companies.
When asked to confirm a budget attached to this program, AMD refused to provide more details until a later date.