Tech Olive

Those new AMD Fusion chips aren’t going to run by themselves. They need a good motherboard to sit on first. Gigabyte will have you covered when you go out and purchase your Fusion. The GA-350N-USB3 is not only their first Fusion board, but it’s also their first ever mini-ITX board for the AMD platform. While it’s more on the small side as far as size, it packs some serious punch as far as features go. It has USB 3.0, SATA 6Gbps, HDMI, and three times the power for charging USB devices such as iPods and other various PMPs.

The motherboard will come with an AMD Fusion E-350 dual-core chip and Radeon HD 6310 graphics, which is powerful enough to play back Blu-ray content, Gigabyte says.

Pricing or availability is still yet to be had.

[Product Page via Press Release]

In a direct effort to best Intel’s Atom chip for netbooks, AMD has announced their Fusion chips. To put it quite simply, the chips are a CPU/GPU combo (just like Intel’s Sandy Bridge) and according to AMD, they offer better CPU performance, better GPU performance (with DirectX11 support), dedicated 1080p HD video processing with HDMI out, and a monstrous 10+ hours battery life. Four models of the chip will be available, the highest being a dual-core 1.6GHz chip and the lowest a single-core 1.2GHz.

A couple of netbooks sporting the Fusion chips have already been announced (HP Pavilion dm1 and the Lenovo X120e) and we should definitely see more pop up within the coming days. AMD even says that Fusion tablets should be coming within the first half of 2011.

[Press Release]