It seems to always be a race to find out what on earth is going on with slides and announcements coming from companies. In weeks prior we brought a piece out about the 8W combo package that AMD was planning to launch, the chip aiming to fight the Atom on the overall consumption front as the chipset is still a power hog right now for Intel, given the low frequency report it seemed to be a bit confusing about what it would be able to deliver but that ends now with "Shrike" now on the table.

Shrike brings new features that help make it a contender for the LV or ULV space, the main being that this isn't just a CPU but it's a Fusion CPU featuring 2 cores and a real dedicated GPU on the chip instead of something sub-par such as the Intel GMA series. It also seems to be acting as a direct evolution from the Puma chipset that AMD had earlier announced given that all these percentage improvements are over the Puma platform which does chase me off a bit from considering an AMD portable if they're already passing it by on a chip targeted for a much smaller platform.

As a new entry to the marketplace though, it looks like this will do well with the upcoming Netbook systems from companies like Dell, Fujitsu and Lenovo as producers will see the CPU, GPU and Southbridge all integrated into a single chip. AMD will be looking into making this part of phase 2 in their mobile initiative, Puma is currently leading that plan right now but will take a back seat to this Fusion processor when it arrives next year after the company starts moving their server and desktop parts down to 45nm allowing for lower power consumption and higher frequencies so that they can have a good battle against Intel in the marketplace without overheating or coming up short on clockspeed.

Unfortunately most won't have much to talk about since the company says the platform will be hitting about midway through 2009, leaving the marketplace to Intel and VIA for the time being. Hopefully the company ramps up development and really does carry out something since they've been talking about Fusion on paper for years now with nothing really to show for it, if they can beat Intel to the punch with something noteworthy then they'll help themselves get a larger piece of the market and be able to capitalize on it by being a step ahead.