Rick Bergman, AMD's senior vice president and general manager, gave more details Tuesday morning on the company's Fusion APUs at its analyst day, demoing its latest chips.

According to Bergman, at 4 AM CT, the company's facility in Singapore shipped its Fusion chip to customers. He showed off a system that he said would be shipping in January that was very thin and light, and kept it running showing high-definition video, saying it would run for many hours.

That system was running the 18-watt Zacate APU, which he said would deliver twice the gaming performance at half the power. There's also a 9-watt version called Ontario, which is aimed at low-power systems like netbooks and ultra-mobile form factors. Both of these use the new "Bobcat" core and are part of the Brazos platform, which he said would enable battery life of up to 10 hours.

Bergman also showed a demo of the upcoming 32nm "Llano" chip, which he said was shipping test units to system-maker customers now, and said it would be shipping in the first half of 2011. This is a higher-end system aimed at mainstream desktops and notebooks. Bergman said it would give customers a "supercomputer in a laptop."

For this demo, he showed a system playing a DirectX 11 game while running high-definition video on another screen, and said it was the first notebook product that could do that -- although the demo seemed to be on a desktop.

Another demo showed Zambezi, an 8-core chip based on the upcomoing high-end "Bulldozer" core, which is also due later next year. He showed it running a DirectX 11 game and using all 8 cores.

He quickly went through roadmaps for upcoming laptop and desktops, promising new APUs every year. As part of this, the company is promsing "Trinity" to replace Llano for mainstream computing sometime in 2012; with Krisha (at 28nm) following for the low-power space.

 

Don Newell, chief technology officer for servers, discussed the server roadmap, which includes "Interlagos" (for 8/12, and 16-core systems in a dual-die configuration), and Valencia (for 6 or 8 cores in a single die) due later in 2011. In 2012, he said this would be followed up with Terrarmar with up to 20 cores, and "Sepang" with up to 10 cores -- both using a "next-generation" of the Bulldozer core with other enhancements in areas like interconnects.

Overall, Bergman said AMD's strategy was to deliver winning platforms, differentiate with its GPUs, and push its APU strategy. That strategy dates back five years, he said, back to a time when there were very little things like Skype and HDTVs. Now, AMD is showing a system with 12 million pixels (on multiple displays using the company's Eyefinity technology in its Radeon boards); video conferencing is common; laptops will get up to 10 hours of battery life; and gaming systems have motion detect (AMD's GPU is in the Xbox 360 with the Kinect controller).

Knocking Intel's upcoming "Sandy Bridge" chips, which also integrate CPU and GPU functions, he noted how some hotels have ocean views and garden views, but "all of us deserve the ocean view." He said AMD's competitor was talking about "good-enough graphics," but that a true APU requires GPU leadership, including world-class Direct X 11-capable graphics processing -- not an architecture that is a few years old. Obviously, we'll have to wait until we see systems shipping to really know performance.

He said AMD has shipped more than 25 million DirectX 11 GPUs, and AMD has shipped 90 percent of these. He mentioned that the company just announced its second-generation Direct X 11 product line (with its HD 6870), and talked about how the GPU has been outpacing Moore's Law

Bergman talked about how there were two industry standard APIs for running computing operations on a GPU -- OpenCL and DirectX11 --, and said there was no room for proprietary standards -- a hit on Nvidia's CUDA platform, used in its GPU computing platform.

Originally posted to Michael Miller's blog, Forward Thinking.