ATI Technologies

In today’s video Ryan and I dig into AMD’s new “APU” (short for Accelerated Processing Unit) technology.  The short version of this is that AMD basically mashed together a high performance CPU and a high performance GPU into one tiny, fast, energy sipping chip.  That means great performance AND great battery life!

Last year I wrote about Sony’s amazing VAIO Z. It was the PC I used for several months as my main work laptop and the one that was in my bag when my son was born last June. I defined the Z as “luxury computing”; it was fast, light, beautifully designed and sported features that no other laptop on the market had. To this day I rank it as one of the best PC’s I’ve ever used.

AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit is taking place this week in Bellevue, WA and AMD is taking the opportunity to launch their high-end series of APUs (Accelerated Processing Units). If you recall – an APU is the combination of the CPU and GPU into a single die. AMD’s Fusion family of APU processors is a combination of multi-core CPU (x86) technology with discrete-level graphics.

This morning Dell announced the new the new Inspiron M5030, the first Spanish-language laptop available in the U.S., to Los Angeles consumers.  It’s the same laptop that Dell successfully introduced to customers in Miami and Atlanta in April.  The M5030 is a really cool concept; it’s a great 15” laptop packed with an AMD Athlon™ II Dual-Core P360, 4GB of RAM, a huge 320GB hard drive, discrete ATI HD graphics, and an HD screen, and it’s outfitted with a Spanish-language keyboard and a Spanish version

AMD today has announced a new offering in their Radeon HD 6000 Series line-up of GPUs – the Radeon HD 6790.

Sony lifted the curtain on a pretty sweet new laptop, the high-end VAIO S Series. The new 13.3” PCs boast some pretty impressive specs, like new “Sandybridge” i5 and i7 processors, solid state drives, backlit keyboards, Blu-Ray and hybrid AMD Radeon HD 6630 graphics that auto-switch between discrete and integrated GPUs.

It’s been one week since a few of us from the Internet Explorer team were down in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011. While we spent much of our time demonstrating the IE9 beta to CES attendees, industry analysts, and press, we had the chance to get out of the booth and talk to some of the sites and companies building some interesting innovations using IE9.

One of the big announcements at CES 2011 was AMD’s announcement of their Fusion APU.  Brandon wrote a great post on APU technology and why you should care, but for more detail I met with John Taylor, AMD’s Director of Fusion Marketing:

David Ragones, Director of Marketing at NVIDIA, took me through their booth to show all of the amazing things that you can do with NVIDIA’s new GPU lineup.  Not only did he show me the 3D video wall that was playing 500 Windows-only 3D games, but he also poured me a cold one off of the liquid cooled, multi-GPU packing “Kegputer” gaming rig.

I’m excited about the news today from Microsoft announcing that the next version of Windows will support System on a Chip architectures from Intel, AMD, and ARM. We announced that the next version of Windows will support System on a Chip (SoC) architectures including ARM-based systems from partners NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments.  And, on the x86 architecture, Intel and AMD continue their work on low-power SoC designs that fully support Windows, including support for x86 applications.