With AMD's first Fusion APUs for notebooks and desktops only a few short weeks away, it's now up to the partners to start supporting the new platform.
We've already had a sneak-peek at a Mini-ITX board from Gigabyte, but now the chip-maker has announced that industry heavy-weights ASUS, MSI and Sapphire are also on board. The latter is more commonly known as AMD's biggest graphics-card partner, but has also released a few AMD socket-motherboards over the years.
At first these will all be based on the 18 watt Zacate APU or the 9 watt Ontario APU which comprise the Brazos platform. Given the low power-consumption and the fact that the chips won't use a traditional CPU socket, it's likely that all of the boards will be in either the Mini-ITX or μATX form-factors. Some or all of these manufacturers will also be designing notebooks system boards based on the same platform.
As well as consumer products, AMD took the opportunity to announce an embedded version of the processor, codenamed eBrazos, which will be marketed as the G-Series. However, there aren't any details on these processors yet, nor on how they'll differ from their desktop and notebook counterparts.
In case you'd forgotten, Fusion is AMD's big play at the mobile market, combining a moderate CPU with a fairly capable DirectX 11-class GPU in a single low-power package. The chips, which are due to launch at CES in January, are the culmination of years of work that began with the acquisition of ATI in late 2006.
