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TABLET MAKER Fusion Garage has confirmed UK pricing for its Grid 10 tablet and announced that its smartphone will soon be coming to the UK.

The WiFi only version of the Grid 10 tablet will cost £259, while the WiFi and 3G model will be priced at £359. Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan told The INQUIRER that the tablet has “the highest screen resolution of any tablet” at 1366×768.

Last month, we reported that Fusion Garage had stepped back into the limelight, following up its widely criticised Joojoo tablet.

The firm’s disastrous Joojoo unit failed to live up to the claims of the firm’s founder, Rathakrishnan.

Now Fusion Garage has a custom version of Google’s Android operating system, called Grid OS. It can run Android apps but they must be accessed through Amazon’s app store rather than the Android Market.

The 10.1in tablet has a dual-core 1.2GHz Tegra processor and 16GB of storage. It uses Microsoft Bing as its internet search engine and has a front facing camera for video chat but no rear facing camera as Rathakrishnan thought it unnecessary.

Meanwhile, the Grid 4 is a 4in smartphone that has a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. No UK pricing has been announced for the phone as yet, but it costs 9 in the US. The device will launch in the UK in the fourth quarter and Fusion Garage is currently in talks with operators and retailers about stocking it.

The Grid 10 tablet will be available at Amazon from 15 September.

The tablet is reasonably priced and its custom operating system gives it some nice features. However Fusion Garage will need get the smartphone and tablet to mobile operators and into electronics retail stores to stand a chance at succeeding. µ

CHIP DESIGNER AMD has launched its updated C and E series Fusion accelerated processing units (APUs) and they are available today.

These AMD Fusion chips are designed for netbooks, notebooks and all-in-on PCs. They offer a boost in performance and enhanced HD graphics capabilities. The integrated CPU and graphics chips aim to give consumers HD video streaming, sharp photos and great gaming through onboard parallel processing graphics engines.

“Today’s PC users want stunning HD graphics and accelerated performance with all-day battery life and that’s what AMD Fusion APUs deliver,” said Chris Cloran, VP and general manager of the Client Division at AMD. “With these new APUs, we’re bringing premium features to entry-level products that let users get a richer computing experience.”

The updated E series chips have support for DDR3 1333 RAM and HDMI 1.4a for 3D technology. Both APUs extend battery life for laptops, with 10.5 hours on the E series and 12 hours on the C series.

Devices based on these APUs are available from today and have ‘Vision Technology from AMD’ or ‘HD Internet’ stickers on them. AMD has sold more than five million of the previous C and E series APUs during the second quarter of this year. µ

THE INAUGURAL AMD Fusion Developer Summit, which is ending just as we write this story, can’t compare in size yet to Intel’s annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF), but by all measures seems to have been quite a success. With over 700 attendees – nearly half above the number expected – and three and a half days chock full of keynotes and technical sessions from Monday through Thursday, the event held in Bellevue, Washington, just a quick ride from Microsoft headquarters, had some interesting things to highlight.

While the summit was focused on encouraging the development community to embrace and optimise their coding for the Fusion approach, even beyond AMD platforms, AMD used the opportunity to also announce some new things and show off some of its long term company strategy. Unfortunately, the expected star of the show, AMD’s Bulldozer CPU, was still nowhere to be seen. AMD still has a month or two before we’ll see those next generation processors running, I believe.

However, finally AMD has staged quite a comeback. The ‘Llano’ A-Series Fusion APU’s four core processors, while not the top performers in CPU per core benchmarks, are good enough for laptop and many mainstream desktop uses, and have an integrated GPU that is also good enough for a majority of DirectX 11 games on its own. We’ll cover the new processor in more detail as we benchmark it, however it is clear that this APU will capture quite a handy share of the notebook and entry desktop market all by itself. Simply put, the ability to put in absolutely everything including graphics that basically doesn’t need to be upgraded for a year or two during typical home use onto a low power mini ITX board in an equally small home theatre device is astounding. In short, it is a very balanced design.

The comments about Llano on the floor, among the attendees, were generally very positive, especially about tightly integrating those near half Teraflops of single precision floating-point performance. Even previewing the next generation Trinity, the Bulldozer-based 2012 Llano successor, didn’t change the focus on the current part.

Besides Llano in both mobile and soon to be unveiled desktop versions, the other star of the show was the Fusion programming architecture itself. Even Microsoft, with its new C++ AMP, has endorsed the programming model supporting multiple processor types, from heavy general purpose out-of-order cores to many smaller in-order cores, and of course hundreds of GPU mini cores, all at same time, where the application schedules the appropriate codes to appropriate resources. Same with the memory model, whether it is a tightly shared memory space between CPUs or CPU and GPU or a loose memory model across many machines or even a cloud. The future code has to handle all this, if it is to extract maximum performance on diverse hardware platforms.

In summary, a good event beyond expectations, and it would have been even better if Bulldozer processors and next-generation graphics had been shown at the same time too, for a triple crown CPU-GPU-APU spread. Look for our further coverage of the Fusion technology update in an upcoming article. µ

Gateway announced this past Moday that they're releasing to the market a trio of value-oriented desktop (well, really nettop) replacement notebooks built around AMD's Fusion platform. Brazos has been a big hit with OEMs as nearly every major manufacturer is producing machines based around it, particularly the extremely popular E-350 APU.

The new NV series from Gateway features across the board 15.6" LED-backlit 1366×768 displays, wireless-n connectivity, HDMI, 1.3-megapixel webcams, and six-cell, 44Wh batteries. They also feature the now-traditional Acer/Gateway island-style keyboard that remains the bane of my existence, much to Jarred's continued amusement. As a whole the line may not seem too exciting, but remember these notebooks are gunning for users on the strictest of budgets and top out at an MSRP of 0.

Gateway's flagship model is the catchily-named NV51B05u. This is the 0 one, and it ships with the AMD E-350 APU, 3GB of DDR3, and a 500GB 5400-RPM hard drive. Presently, the NV51B05u is the only model on Gateway's website, but it can be found here. Gateway quotes over four hours of running time on the battery, and our experience with the E-350 suggests that figure is probably accurate for moderate loads.

On the other hand, Gateway is a little more cagey with detailed specs about the other models that are rounding out the line. At 0 is the NV51B02u, which also features the E-350. Odds are good this model has a smaller hard drive and/or less RAM. And at the extremely entry-level 0 price point is the NV51B08u which swaps out the E-350 for the C-50. The AMD C-50 retains both cores, but runs at a much slower 1GHz and clocks the graphics core at just 280MHz, though it also features a TDP of just 9W, half that of the already frugal E-350.

Unfortunately these prices seem a little on the high side for what you get. Compare the NV51 series to Gateway's own NV50: starting at 0, you get bumped up to a 2.1GHz Phenom II triple-core and 4GB of DDR3. Of course you'll sacrifice mobility and battery life for the privilege, so for users who are going to want to take their 15.6" notebook onn the go, the newer NV51 with the E-350 may seem like the better call. Ultimately, though, an important takeaway is that this extreme budget market segment may not be for you, but users who don't need much from a machine are going to get more mileage out of these notebooks. This is a market that used to be served by AMD's dire V-series processor, so the E-350 is going to be a major upgrade. 

And just to sweeten the pot, we'll have Toshiba's 15.6" Brazos model, the C655D, in house soon.

The media streamer market is a highly competitive one, where you have the big players like Western Digital and Netgear, and the really small ones like Micca. None of these companies have media players as their sole product, because it is quite difficult to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack in that market. We were surprised to learn of Nixeus, a Los Angeles based company, that was founded in 2010 with the purpose of bringing multimedia solutions to the market.

Nixeus introduced their first media player, the Nixeus Fusion HD, towards the middle of 2010. It made a big splash online, and there were many people on AVSForum singing its praise. The support was great, and reported bugs were looked into quickly. This encouraged us to get hold of a review sample. Read on to find out how the Nixeus Fusion HD fares in our stringent review.

IT LOOKS LIKE Asus is designing a mini-ITX mainboard for AMD’s first low-power Fusion chip code-named Ontario.

Details about the motherboard are hard to find. It would appear that Asus wants to put it under the bonnet of home entertainment systems that it has planned, but it could equally end up as part of an EeePC or similar setup.

Word on the street is that AMD’s Ontario chip will have the same power as an Athlon II X2 250U, but with a DirectX 11 graphics chip built in and running on only 18W.

If it can do this then it looks like Ontario will be a viable rival to Atom in the mini-ITX market.

Asus is keeping details of performance or the board’s eventual use close to its chest, although Bit-Tech even applied a Chinese burn to the press officer.

All Asus will say is that it is still early days for its mainboard design. µ

 

Comment on this article Flame Author Print Share this: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Linkedin reddit! StumbleUpon Twitter Share Related articles Pine Trail gets launched and tested A game of spin the Atom Tuesday, 22 December 2009, 08:10 AM Read more Hemlock launches, sites review Pick your poison Friday, 20 November 2009, 10:06 AM Read more AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 BE C3 stepping A harbinger of chips to come Thursday, 5 November 2009, 09:42 AM Read more Athlon II X4 620 and 630 reviewed Quad core on the cheap Thursday, 17 September 2009, 18:08 PM Read more 4GB ASUS GTX 285 tested Rare graphics card shock Friday, 28 August 2009, 09:55 AM Read more Core i5 750 as powerful as i7 920 Uh-oh? Thursday, 20 August 2009, 09:55 AM Read more < Previous article| Next article > Comments Not even close

18 watts for the Graphics chip alone? I get that it’s more powerful than an X3100, but people aren’t building their HTPCs as FPS machines. A high end dual core Atom is 13 Watts FOR EVERYTHING.

AMD, you fail once again.

posted by : Dan, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @Dan

Umm…did you read the article? It’s 18 W for the CPU + GPU + Northbridge. And, given that it will be profoundly more capable than the Atom at pretty much everything , I think it will be quite competitive, in both performance and power.

posted by : Ryan, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @Dan

Boy, can you read? "Word on the street is that AMD’s Ontario chip will have the same power as an Athlon II X2 250U, but with a DirectX 11 graphics chip built in and running on only 18W." 18 watts for everything. I’m not going to argue about the rest you said because i couldnt care less about it, i use a CPU + discrete in my PC and will not use ontario. But man, you gotta start reading more accurately

posted by : StickyGlue, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment Agree

I agree with Dan, but I’m mad as a box of frogs.

posted by : Bob, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment Passive

I hope the final product is passively cooled and the whole thing with disks, 4GB of memory and other IO takes under 60W at full load so I can build that nice, small computer for the little sister moving out of home. The Ontario family should have some "cooler" members as well..

posted by : Anonymous Coward, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @ Anonymous Coward

You may want to look into an Atom-based system. I built a home server using one several months ago and couldn’t be happier. The whole system (including 4 500GB HDDs, minus monitor) only uses 36 watts according to my Kill-A-Watt. The chip is passively-cooled with a big aluminum heat sink, so the only fan in the system is a big 120mm on the rear of the case. It runs cool, even tucked away in a corner under a desk in my home office.

I’ve been thinking about buying another to replace an old Dell P4 I’m using as a HTPC when it finally croaks (which it will. Soon. It’s one of the shoddy Optiplex models they’re being sued over), but this all-in-one solution may be a more viable option.

posted by : Jon, 13 August 2010 Complain about this comment @dan

Did you get a good paycheck from intel this week?

posted by : AMD Fanboy, 14 August 2010 Complain about this comment atom still sucks for HD

If this system can make a nice HTPC with limited gaming capability, I might be game. And this is just because I deposited my last check from Intel last week.

posted by : Rob, 14 August 2010 Complain about this comment Most read Most commented Most watched Tesco offers a cheap Sim-only mobile phone deal A scary number of security suites fail on Windows Vista An AMD 3.0GHz Thuban processor is in the shops Google tries to save face after its Verizon deal O2 Iphone 4 prices tip up Apple releases a 12 core Mac Pro Nokia N8 tips up online Windows XP SP2 could live on thanks to Grand Theft Auto PC sales are falling AMD talks up the GPU Sony motion controller video demo

check out the glowing orb

Microsoft Kinect athletics game video demo

INQ readers must watch this

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