Advanced Micro Devices' way towards Fusion of central processing units and graphics processing units has been long, but it seems to be about paying off as the company announces an ultra-low power accelerated processing unit with as low as 17.5W power consumption amid high level of performance to arrive in 2012.

"We plan to introduce a version of Trinity that will consume less than 50% the power of today's lowest power, 35W Llano APU, bringing performance computing to the ultra-thin notebooks," said Thomas Seifert, interim chief exec of AMD, during the discussion of financial results of the company with financial analysts.

Trinity is the first microprocessor that AMD showcased physically that features the company's next-generation Bulldozer x86 processing engines along with a new-generation Radeon graphics engine (presumably utilizing VLIW4 micro-architecture). Apparently, it has a lot of advantages beyond performance over current products.

"We put out a pretty interesting power-consumption specification. I don't know if we really want to go into more details about that product at this time, other than the fact that we're going to continue to invest in leading in the mobile space," said Mr. Seifert.

Tags: AMD, Bulldozer, Trinity, Llano, 32nm