The manufacturing of the code-named Ontario accelerated processing unit (APU) by Advanced Micro Devices may being as early as this quarter at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Revenues obtained from manufacturing of code-named Ontario processors designed for low-power notebooks and netbooks are projected to play a significant role in TSMC's business results in the second half of 2010, reported Commercial Times news-paper (parts of which article were translated and published by DigiTimes web-site). Based on comments made by executives by AMD, it was expected that the world's second largest maker of central processing units will start to make the Ontario APUs in the Q4 2010.

The chip designer expects actual systems based on the code-named Ontario accelerated processing units (APUs) to become available early next year. Unfortunately, those devices will not be revolutionary technological masterpieces, but rather prosaic low-cost netbooks with improved performance of microprocessor as well as DirectX 11 graphics support. While at present there are no netbooks with such feature-set, it is not generally clear whether there is demand for advanced graphics on netbooks with small screens.

AMD code-named Ontario features two x86 cores based on Bobcat micro-architecture, integrated DirectX 11-class graphics core and DDR3 memory controller on a single-chip system-on-chip (SoC) device. As reported previously, the Bobcat micro-architecture features x86-64, virtualization, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 technologies and will be single-threaded with out-of-order execution. The actual Ontario microprocessor, which is a dual-core chip, will be able to offer 90% of today’s “mainstream performance” in less than half of die area. AMD claims that Bobcat-based products are sub-1W capable. The SoC will be made using a 40nm fabrication process at TSMC. AMD Ontario is the key part of AMD Brazos platform for low-power devices.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: AMD, Fusion, Ontario, Brazos, 40nm, , TSMC