Prepare for Sub-$500 Ultrathins: AMD's Fusion Trinity, Pictured

From DailyTech: Intel Corp. (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) don't exactly see eye to eye on most things, but at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, they seemed to both be in agreement that ultrathin notebook computers were what ready for primetime in 2012.

AMD, however, was less than thrilled with Intel for trademarking the name "Ultrabook". To AMD this was akin to Intel claiming it invented the ultrathin. In AMD's mind it was the first to push this movement, when it debutted the Athlon Neo three years ago. A 1.6 GHz 15 watt BGA-mounted chip, the Neo was indeed much like the ultrathin-aimed chips of today. It was also arguably the precursor to AMD's biggest success story of its CPU business today -- Fusion.

Back in January 2011 AMD's first family of Fusion APUs ("accelerated" processing units) -- Brazos -- launched, branded as the C-Series and E-Series. Packing a GPU somewhere between a Radeon 5000 HD and 6000 HD, and a new core architecture -- Bobcat -- Brazos offered modest CPU performance and strong integrated GPU performance at a budget-friendly price.

Brazos was being contracted to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Comp., Ltd. (TPE:2330) (TSMC) for production at the 40 nm node. Meanwhile Llano was being produced by AMD's chipmaker spinoff GlobalFoundries, Inc. at a smaller 32 nm node.

Unlike Brazos, Llano wasn't bring a wholly new core design to the table. It packed a variant of the well-tread K10-core, the same core found in AMD's Phenom II and Athlon II processors. The modified version was known as K10.5 and was codenamed Stars.

Fast forward to present and AMD has big plans for Fusion. This time out AMD has scrapped its low-end Brazos successors (code-named Krishna and Wichita) in favor of perfecting Trinity, the first of its successor chips to Llano.

While the future of AMD's lighter-weight chips is uncertain, what is clear is that AMD feels that Trinity is the perfect chip to snatch up ultrathin market share. Trinity will pack a powerful on-die GPU, which falls somewhere between a Radeon 6000 HD and 7000 HD in architecture. It will also ditch the aging K10 architecture for a leaner, enhanced 32 nm Bulldozer core, code-named Piledriver.

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