Further fusion
AMD has released the beta version of its latest foray into free software designed to enhance the experience for PC users. It brought us the beta of its Fusion for gaming utility last year, which has now been formally released, and yesterday AMD unveiled Fusion Media Explorer (FME).
The release of FME was announced with zero PR fanfare on yet another AMD executive's blog. The exec in question this time was Casey Gotcher, product marketing director. We first spoke to Gotcher about this product back in November and he made it clear then that AMD didn't want to release even the beta until it was happy with it.
Of course this is just the beta, and they don't tend to divert too much marketing budget, but we've heard that the full v1.0 launch is expected to occur at this year's Computex.
One other thing AMD seems to be being a tad cagey about is that, at least in its current form, FME doesn't run on PCs with Intel CPUs. Neither the blog nor the release notes say this explicitly, but it's very strongly implied. It's not clear whether this is for technical or commercial reasons, or both, but it will obviously limit the scope of the beta phase.
For those of you who don't have an AMD system to try it out on, we gave it a quick go. Read on to get our initial impressions.
