Advanced Micro Devices will go after the notebook computer market with its Fusion processors, which will merge x86 and graphics cores. The chips, which are expected to ship in 2009, will power notebooks with "significant, though not dramatic" improvements in performance per watt, outgunning offerings from archrival Intel, AMD says.

AMD announced the Fusion program upon completing its acquisition of graphics chip designer ATI Technologies in October. At that time it said the chips would be aimed at everything from palmtops to supercomputers. Now AMD's getting specific about where it will focus its efforts. "We'll start in mobile and hopefully integrate upwards" into desktops, said Steve Polzin, chief platform architect at AMD, in a keynote address at the DesignCon conference last week.

The company's strategy aims to re-create its success with Opteron CPUs, which combine a memory controller and standard cache coherent interconnect, easing the job of building multiprocessing servers as well as multicore processors. That integration effort let AMD grab a slice of the server market from Intel.

Like servers, notebook computers represent a fast-growing and relatively high-margin segment of the PC sector. The integration of graphics is driven by the need to support high-defini- tion video and high-quality graphics while maintaining low power consumption, Polzin said.

STANDARD CONSENSUS

Key to AMD's success will be an effort to drive industry consensus on a small set of standard application programming interfaces to enable the hybrid Fusion chips. "We recognize software is a big part of making accelerated processors work well," Polzin said in an interview. "One API would be our nirvana, and I hope we can get there, but I don't think ... we're going to. In the near term there will be a few APIs for different market spaces."