Vizio, a well-known consumer electronics supplier, this week introduced the industry’s second tablet with AMD Z-60 accelerated processing unit inside. The novelty is a little slimmer compared to previously unveiled Fujitsu tablet with AMD’s chip inside, but is still not as slim as popular media tablets, such as Apple iPad. But while it may be thicker than some rivals, it features a number of remarkable advantages.

The world’s second tablet with AMD “Hondo” Z-60 inside seems to be a power-house. Vizio’s slate features 11.6” screen with 1920*1080 (full-HD, 1080p) resolution with support for 10-finger multi-touch gestures as well as 64GB NAND flash storage, Wi-Fi, micro-HDMI and so on. The media tablet also has dual speaker stereo sound and the performance-tuned DTS SRS Premium Sound HD audio system.

The tablet is just 0.4” (1.016cm) thick, but weighs 816 grams, which is significantly higher compared to ARM-based tablets. Still, considering broad compatibility with various software (thanks to Windows 8) as well as high-performance Radeon HD graphics, the tablet seems to have a nice balance between features and weight.

Vizio seems to be positioning its 11.6” tablet for entertainment purposes on the first place, but keeping in mind Windows 8 OS, the slate can potentially replace a road warrior’s laptop without a lot of compromise.

“We built a tablet PC with Windows 8 that truly allows consumers to accomplish any task while being mobile. We are excited to work together with AMD to bring consumers a Tablet PC with the Windows experience that also delivers exceptional visuals using AMD’s expertise in superior graphics processing,” said Matt McRae, chief technology officer at Vizio.

Unfortunately, pricing of the Vizio tablet is unknown.

AMD Z-60 "Hondo" APU features two x86 Bobcat cores clocked at 1.0GHz with 1MB of L2 cache (512KB per core), AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics adapter with 80 stream processors and video decoding engine as well as single-channel DDR3 memory controller. The most noticeable difference between Hondo and Ontario is power consumption: the Z-60 has maximum thermal design power of just 4.5W. To tailor capabilities of Hondo towards traditional media tablets, AMD developed Start Now technology, which resumes from sleep mode in two seconds, boots to Windows 8 in 25 seconds and syncs to a preferred local network in 1.5 seconds. In addition, Z-60 comes with a special Fusion controller hub (FCH), which has a number of capabilities switched off to reduce power consumption.

Tags: Vizio, AMD, Windows 8, Hondo, Fusion, Radeon