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Acer Aspire 5253 and 4253 to feature AMD Fusion chips

Intel turned heads with its next-gen Core CPUs this week and, not to be outdone, AMD's unveiled its rival Fusion chips, set to grace Acer's forthcoming Aspire 5253 and 4253 laptops.

Rory Reid
2 min read

Intel turned heads with its next-generation Core CPUs this week and, not to be outdone, AMD's busy pimping its rival Fusion processors, which have been snapped up by Acer for use in the forthcoming Aspire 5253 and 4253 laptops.

AMD refers to its Fusion processors as APUs (accelerated processing units) because they combine the features of a central processing unit with those of graphics processing units -- kind of like Intel does with its Sandy Bridge architecture.

AMD Fusion's headline features are great graphics performance and excellent battery life, though the Aspire 5253's specs aren't exactly mind-blowing on paper. Acer claims the 15.6-inch laptop will last 3 hours and 20 minutes away from the mains using the standard 4,400mah six-cell battery pack, which is decent but hardly Earth-shattering.

We're not getting our hopes up where computing performance is concerned, either. The AMD E-350 processor in the 5253 runs at just 1.6GHz, which is netbook territory. As for graphics, its 15.6-inch display runs at a mere 1,366x768-pixel resolution, which is on the low side for such a large screen, and the accompanying Radeon HD 6470M graphics packs just 512MB of dedicated DDR3 video memory.

That said, Acer reckons the hardware's quick enough to create and edit high definition movies, so we'll reserve judgement until we see one in the flesh.

The second of the two Acer laptops announced today, the Aspire 4253, comes with a slightly smaller 14-inch, 1,366-768-pixel display. This model uses a choice of AMD E-240 (1.5GHz) or E-350 (1.6GHz) processors and the same Radeon HD 6470M graphics as its big brother.

Battery life on the Aspire 4253 jumps to a more respectable 4.5 hours with the standard 4,400mAh battery pack, though we presume this figure is only achievable using the slower of the two AMD processors.

Both machines come in a choice of black, brown or red with matching palm rest colours. Pricing is still TBC, but Acer says both will go on sale in the second quarter of 2011. Watch out for full hands on later in the year.