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Not long after news of Intel shipping thousands of Sandy Bridge samples, AMD have announced at their own financial conference that Llano sampling has been according to plan, and have started sending samples to customers. The first two Fusion products - Llano and Ontario - are well on track for production by end 2010, with release scheduled for early 2011.

Llano is basically a 32nm APU which combines four Phenom II cores with 400 DX11 SPs from the HD 5000 family, for a powerful mainstream CPU+GPU solution. Basically, what we are looking at is a HD 5670 type GPU and a Phenom II quad core CPU in one die - a remarkable achievement.

Llano will be dual, triple of quad core products, with TDP ranging from 20W to 59W - aimed at notebooks, part of the Sabine platforms. Desktop oriented Llano APUs will fill the Lynx platform, and TDPs can be expected to be higher. Of course, the entire die is fabricated at the 32nm SOI process - including the GPU part.

In addition to Llano comes the power efficient Ontario part, based on a new architecture - Bobcat. It will be a dual core CPU, with AMD claiming "90% of mainstream performance" at under 10W TDP and half the die size. At first glance, Ontario looks to be taking aim at Intel's Atom. However, Bobcat-based products can scale as low as sub-1W, make it appropriate for not just netbooks and low power desktops, but also more portable devices like MIDs, or iPad like touch devices.

AMD's first fusion part, Llano, is on track for an early 2011 release, right alongside Intel's Sandy Bridge. Ontario will also release in early 2011. Interestingly, there is no new of AMD's next-generation Bulldozer CPUs, which are still on schedule for a vague release timeline of "2011".

Reference: Xbitlabs