Acer has just placed an order for 80,000 pieces of AMD Z-series accelerated processing units. Based on essentially the same design as Fusion "Zacate", Z-series APUs are designed to have lower TDP and to be of higher quality, so they could be deployed in enterprise and IPC (industrial PC) environments. The AMD Z-01 is Acer's choice, this chip combines two x86-64 cores clocked at 1.00 GHz with AMD Radeon HD 6250 DirectX 11 compliant graphics, and a DDR3 memory controller. The TDP of the entire chip stands at 5.9W, it is built on the 40 nm process at TSMC.

Acer's first tablets based on AMD Z-01 will run Windows 7, since Android 3.0 (codenamed "Ice Cream Sandwich") is not going to be out any time before the end of 2011. Acer isn't the only big tablet-maker opting for AMD Z-series over Intel's Atom Pine Trail platform, MSI is also reported to be working on x86 tablets running AMD Z-series. Manufacturers are opting for Z-series over Pine Trail, because the latter has both higher price and TDP. With its relatively faster iGPU, Z-series should be able to drive graphics-intensive custom user-interfaces on tables sized up to 10.1-inches. Industry sources expect AMD to ship up to 500,000 units of the chip in the second half of 2011.