The first Fusion platform by Advanced Micro Devices has taken nearly the final shape and some predictions can be made about notebooks powered by AMD Sabine platform. Based on the information from sources close to AMD, the Sabine will boast with a rather rich set of features and will also be very power efficient thanks to innovative design of Llano accelerated processing unit (APU).

As reported earlier, AMD Llano accelerated processing unit (APU) will have four x86 cores based on the current micro-architecture each of which will have 9.69mm² die size (without L2 cache), a little more than 35 million transistors (without L2 cache), 2.5W – 25W power consumption, 0.8V – 1.3V voltage and target clock-speeds at over 3.0GHz clock-speed. The cores will dynamically scale their clock-speeds and voltages within the designated thermal design power in order to boost performance when a program does not require all four processing engines or trim power consumption when there is no demand for resources. According to sources familiar with the matter, different versions of Llano processor will have thermal design power varying from 20W to 59W: high-end dual-core, triple-core and quad-core chips will have TDP between 35W and 59W; mainstream chips with two of four x86 cores will fit into 30W thermal envelope and low-power dual-core Llano chips will have 20W TDP.

At present AMD’s high-end quad-core microprocessors for mobile computers have thermal design power of 45W, whereas ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000-series graphics processors with around 400 stream processors sports around 25W TDP. Considering the fact that the maximum configuration of Llano will include four x86 cores as well as 480 stream processors, it can be observed that power consumption of Llano will be a little lower compared to combined TDP of comparable central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) available today. It should be noted that the Llano will be made using 32nm SOI process technology, whereas current CPUs and GPUs are made using 45nm SOI and 40nm bulk fabrication processes, respectively.

AMD Sabine platform will also include code-named Hudson input/output controllers that will support PCI Express graphics port, 16 USB ports, USB 3.0 support (Hudson M3 only), 6 Serial ATA ports with RAID support, 1Gb Ethernet, integrated video DAC, integrated clock-generator and so on. Besides, Sabine may also feature optional Vancouver-series graphics processing units.

It is projected that AMD Sabine platform and Llano APUs will be released in Q1 2011.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: AMD, Sabine, Llano, Fusion, 32nm, ATI, Radeon, Phenom