AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) today brought to a close the AMD Technology Summit held in Rosebank, Johannesburg. The summit was held as an opportunity for AMD to reach out to South African consumers and get us all excited about its upcoming line of products.

 

The AMD product that everyone has been waiting for is of course the company's new AMD Fusion APUs (accelerated processing units), combining the capabilities of a CPU and a GPU on a single chip.

 

First unveiled at CES this year, the Fusion APUs incorporates multi-core x86 CPU technology, powerful DirectX 11 discrete graphics, a parallel processing engine, dedicated high-definition video acceleration block and a high-speed bus into a single die design, an idea that would have been thought impossible just a couple of years ago.

 

Now the wait is almost over, as AMD has embedded these state-of-the-art APUs into new generations of desktops, notebooks and netbooks. Tablets and other mobile devices are also expected to receive Fusion APUs, available from as soon as Q1 2011.

 

Some of the APUs lauded features include stutter-free HD video playback, breakthroughs in computational power to handle the most demanding applications, DirectX 11-capable graphics and an all-day battery life thanks to these APUs needing only a few watts to keep ticking, unlike the veritable power plant needed to supply a separate CPU and GPU with power.

 

As AMD's APUs start gaining a mainstream foothold it could spell more bad news for Intel, as well as putting pressure on new kids on the block, ARM. The Fusion technology is definitely impressive on paper, and we should be able to reaffirm that fact when review devices start showing up at the office.

 

“Hosting the technology summit in South Africa underlines our commitment to the region. AMD is thrilled to be given a platform to share some of its world-class products and innovation in the personal computing space,” said Darren Grasby, CVP, channel and SMB sales, EMEA.