AMD: Over One Million of Fusion APUs Shipped.

AMD: Over 35 Million of DirectX 11 Graphics Chips Supplied

Advanced Micro Devices said that it has so far shipped over one million of accelerated processing units (APUs) for entry-level notebooks as well as netbooks. In addition, the company said that the shipments of its DirectX 11-class graphics processing units (GPUs) have surpassed 35 million units.

"Industry momentum for Fusion is strong and growing. OEM adoption of Brazos is excellent. We shipped more than 1 million Brazos platforms in its debut quarter to world class OEMs including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba," said Thomas Seifert, interim chief executive officer of AMD, during the company's fourth quarter-related conference call with financial analysts.

One million APUs is a rather significant number as AMD formally started to commercially ship its APUs in early November. The wide adoption of the new series of chips means that the there is a lot of interest towards low-power solutions with advanced graphics and video support, a clear indication that end users now pay attention on multimedia functionality like never before.

It remains to be seen whether Brazos platform as well as Ontario and Zacate APUs will help AMD to substantially increase its share on the market of notebook computers. The demand towards mobile PCs is generally growing and AMD's much larger rival Intel Corp. has a lot of very competitive offerings for various types of laptops.

The latest low-power AMD Vision and Mobile Internet platforms (previously code-named Brazos) rely on dual-core or single-core central processing unit with integrated DirectX 11 graphics processor with 80 stream processors, universal video decoder 3.0, various other special-purpose hardware as well as code-named Hudson input/output controller. These APUs feature the new x86 CPU core codenamed Bobcat, which is AMD's first new x86 core since 2003 and was designed from the ground up to deliver stellar mobile performance. AMD expects mobile computers based on the its Brazos platform to work for ten hours or even longer on a single battery charge.

In addition, the company once again reiterated its leadership with the installed base of DirectX-class graphics processors.

"We shipped over 35 million DX11-enabled GPUs to date," informed Mr. Seifert.

ATI, graphics business units of AMD, announced that it had shipped 25 million of DX11 GPUs in mid-October, about a year after the company launched the world's first DirectX 11-supporting graphics processors, ATI Radeon HD 5000.

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Intel's Next-Generation Chip to Support DirectX 11

Intel Corp. plans to integrate a DirectX 11-class graphics processing unit (GPU) into its next-generation code-named Ivy Bridge central processing unit (CPU). The move will allow the accelerated processing unit (APU) to compete head-to-head with Advanced Micro Devices' Fusion-series of chips that already have DirectX 11 support.

"Intel will integrate the technology in next-generation laptop and desktop chips, as use of the technology in applications will spread by then. [...] When we look at the schedule, we did not think it was... the right time. There's not much usage." said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of the PC client group at Intel, in an interview with the IDG News Service.

The latest Intel Core i "Sandy Bridge" microprocessors feature outdated DirectX 10.1-class graphics core and does not support GPGPU technology. By contrast, modern GPUs from ATI/AMD or Nvidia Corp. fully support DirectX 11 along with a number of other advantages that improve quality of video games as well as allow to use graphics processor for general-purpose computing.

Since Ivy Bridge will be made using 22nm process technology, Intel will be able to integrate more logic into the chip. For example, it is rumoured that Ivy Bridge will have 24 stream processors instead of 12 on the Sandy Bridge.

But even Ivy Bridge may not remove the gap between Intel and AMD chips in terms of graphics performance. In its next-generation APUs the Sunnyvale, California-based company may further improve performance and add new features to its integrated GPUs.

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