Even though we're still a few days away from the official launch of AMD's first Fusion APUs, the company is already hard at work on its next generation mobile platform.
According to Digitimes, industry sources say that the 28nm Deccan platform - which will consist of the Krishna and Wichita APUs and the Yuba chipset - will undergo internal testing in the new year and begin sampling to partners in the second quarter. This will lead to mass production in the closing months of the year, meaning that a wide scale launch could come as early as CES 2012.
Deccan will replace Brazos as AMD's platform for notebooks, netbooks and low-power desktops. The manufacturer will also be pushing the chips for use in tablet PCs, which the upcoming Ontario and Zacate APUs will be largely avoiding.
Although we knew to expect the next generation low-power Fusion processors in 2012, a launch early in the year would be a major achievement for the chip designer and its manufacturing partners at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The first batch of APUs will be built on a 40nm process,while the first 32nm chips aren't expected to ship until the middle of next year when the Llano or Zambezi processors launch. To move to a smaller process so quickly would be an impressive feat.
Intel, meanwhile, has been shipping CPUs based on a 32nm node since the start of 2010 and is expected to move to a 22nm process in 2011 or early 2012 with the launch of Ivy Bridge.
At the same time, AMD's 28nm Southern Islands GPUs are expected to ship towards the middle of the new year, meaning that GLOFO will already be up to speed on the process by the end of 2011.
