AMD Fusion APU extend your laptop battery life
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Life of your laptop battery can sometimes be a make or break situation for when working without an electrical outlet to plug into. Towards addressing this problem, AMD has announced their new Fusion line of chips to answer this need. The Fusion APU chip line is supposed to extend battery life by running at lower wattage and therefore consuming less power. Two basic types of chips are reported, the E-350 & E-240 running at 18 watts and the C-50 & C-30 running at 9 watts. The C series is to be targeted at netbooks.
The APU term was created by AMD which they have defined as Accelerated Processor Unit. They purchased ATI, and have taken that technology and bundled it together on the same CPU chip, thus the name Fusion was created. The result of putting both the video and core CPU functionality on the same chip results in far less power being required to run the computers they are in. For laptops, heat is a big concern, so running at a lower wattage will reduce the amount of heat being produced with these new chips.
The major benefactor will be netbooks, which have been promoted as devices which will benefit the most and should see a battery life boost of up to 30%. Those are the current advertising claims and once the chips and netbooks are in wide distribution, we should see some real world tests to know the performance gains. If your battery life was 9 hours before, you are going to see 12 hours with this new chip. If that is correct, you can do a complete work day without ever having to plug into an outlet. For road warriors, this is great news.
