AMD and Fusion’s Ontario Chip is On its Way

Officials from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced last Tuesday that the company’s smaller, power-efficient and Fusion-based laptops will hit shelves early next year. The AMD-Fusion hybrid chips, dubbed as Ontario, is installed inside a CPU that is based on AMD’s new Bobcat low-power architecture. The Ontario chip is a combination of a central and graphics processing units into a single silicon, and will be shipped starting the fourth quarter of this year. According to Dina McKinney, vice president of design engineering at AMD, the first Ontario chips will include two Bobcat processor and DirectX-11 GPU. This will provide a close to 90 percent performance of the processor used in mainstream PCs, but will only occupy half the space. However, the vice president declined to further elaborate about the power drawn by Ontario chips and the budget of the incorporated GPU core. AMD is hoping that the Ontario chip will make them competitive in the netbook market that is currently dominated by Intel,  as DirectX-11 GPU enables full 1080p video playback on small screen.

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