AMD hails Fusion accelerated processing unit success

AMD's Fusion processors now account for half the chipmaker's shipments, the company said on Thursday.

Fusion is AMD's melding of CPUs and GPUs into what the company called accelerated processing units, or APUs. The approach is similar to that taken by Intel with its latest processors, but AMD's APUs offer better performance than Intel's low-powered Atom chips — which are used in the same low-end PC market segment — when it comes to high-definition video playback.

In an investor call associated with AMD's first-quarter 2011 earnings, chief financial officer Thomas Seifert said AMD was "pleased to report excellent [manufacturer] adoption and sell-through to end-users" of the early 'Brazos' Fusion platform.

"In the first full quarter of availability, roughly half of our notebook shipments were based on Brazos, a product rapidly gaining credit for redefining the user experience in both the netbook and thin-and-light notebook [segments]," Seifert said.

Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Sony and Toshiba are all making Fusion-based laptops, the company noted. Seifert also said AMD still intends to ship its Bulldozer server chips by the end of the summer.

AMD's results for Q1 2011 showed revenues of $1.61bn (£979m), two percent down on the previous quarter but two percent up on the first quarter of 2010.