AMD's A-series of Fusion APU's finally launches

Although we expected AMD to announce its A-series of APUs first at Computex and then at E3, it seems like weve finally gotten there as today is D-dayuhm, A-day(?). AMD has launched no less seven mobile parts today, although so far the desktop models have as yet to make an official appearance.

The specifications leaked yesterday, courtesy of none other than AMD itself, but specs alone doesnt tell the whole story. AMDs APUs have been a long time coming and the really big question is if theyll live up to everyones expectations. AMD is making some bold claims, least not in terms of battery life where the company is promising up to 10.5h of usable battery life. In fact, AMD claims that its A8-3510MX APU has 3.5h better battery life than a similar notebook with Intels Core i5-2401M processor.

Where we dont doubt AMD is when it comes to graphics performance, as the company has always had a huge lead here over Intel, but AMD has thrown in a few new features that should further boost the appeal of its APUs. First up AMD has added what the company called Perfect Picture HD which is a post-processing option for cleaning up 1080p video, a feature that might prove popular with people shooting their on HD home videos. The second feature, called Steady Video is rather quite impressive though as you can see in the video below from Engadget, it actually pre and post processes the video to reduce camera shake and it even works with online videos.

As always, AMD is being very competitive on price and the company is expect notebook with its new APUs to start at US$499 with an A4 APU, whereas with an A6 were looking at around US$599 and finally A8 models will come in at around US$699. Of course these are best case scenarios and wed expect a lot more expensive machine to be available as well, depending on configuration. For those looking for a boost to the graphics performance beyond the APUs integrated solution, AMD supports CrossFire on the platform and claim up to a 75 percent performance boost for its discrete mobile GPUs when pairing them up with an APU. Were going to have to hold off on making any judgements until we get some units in for review, but at least on paper it looks like AMD could have a real winner on its hands here.