AMD Announce “Ontario” APU Netbook Chip

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2 Jun, 2010 12:06 pm

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After a loud and fairly non-sequitor drum performance, into which AMD managed to shoehorn a computing metaphor, the American chip maker announced that it’s new breed of “Fusion” System-on-a-Chip APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) – which offer performances increases by combining the CPU and GPU onto single die and connecting the two with a high-speed bus – will come in two flavours codenamed Llano and Ontario.
Llano is it’s standard Notebook chip, while Ontario is a low-power offering aimed at Netbooks and Ultra-Portables.  AMD’s Rick Bergman showed a live demo of the Ontario chip running Alien Vs Predator, and a fine job it did too – the visuals were smooth and the level of detail was good.  The next demo was of an animated web app displaying lots of concurrent animations.  Traditional netbook hardware managed a measely 2FPS, while the APU managed a rather impressive 60FPS.
Obviously these tests are designed to play to the APU’s advantages, so we’ll have to wait for some real-world testing before we can see how the Ontario really stacks up.
AMD certainly seem excited, there was lots of talk of “a new era of computing, – the Fusion era!”.  Other than offering us a sneak-peek at the performance gains and teasing a 1st half 2011 release window, AMD remained tight-lipped about the Fusion chips, refusing to give us any hard numbers regarding performance increases over current hardware.

After a loud and fairly non-sequitor drum performance, into which AMD managed to shoehorn a computing metaphor, the American chip maker announced that it’s new breed of “Fusion” System-on-a-Chip APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) – which offer performances increases by combining the CPU and GPU onto single die and connecting the two with a high-speed bus – will come in two flavours codenamed Llano and Ontario.

Llano is it’s standard Notebook chip, while Ontario is a low-power offering aimed at Netbooks and Ultra-Portables.  AMD’s Rick Bergman showed a live demo of the Ontario chip running Alien Vs Predator, and a fine job it did too – the visuals were smooth and the level of detail was good.  The next demo was of an animated web app displaying lots of concurrent animations.  Traditional netbook hardware managed a measely 2FPS, while the APU managed a rather impressive 60FPS.

Obviously these tests are designed to play to the APU’s advantages, so we’ll have to wait for some real-world testing before we can see how the Ontario really stacks up.

AMD certainly seem excited, there was lots of talk of “a new era of computing, – the Fusion era!”.  Other than offering us a sneak-peek at the performance gains and teasing a 1st half 2011 release window, AMD remained tight-lipped about the Fusion chips, refusing to give us any hard numbers regarding performance increases over current hardware.

In the mean time, here’s an ATI Eyefinity rig that you nor I will ever own.


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