Notebooks with AMD's first Fusion processors, based on the 40nm ‘Ontario' architecture are going to hit the shops early next year. While we have known that AMD will be shipping to partners before the end of this year it is not clear when we would see some products based on the chips.

Digitimes has been talking to its deep throats in the manufacturing industry who told hacks that they will be shipping notebooks based on the new APUs in the first quarter of next year. TSMC, which is helping AMD make the 40nm chips, will ramp-up to full-scale production of the new silicon in early December. Acer, ASUS and HP apparently should have plenty of time to start manufacturing systems for a launch in the new year.

Although Digitimes used its usual “unnamed sources” for the news, it does line up with last month's leaked AMD roadmap. In that we saw the the Zacate CPU/GPU combo as launching at the tail-end of this year or the start of next year.

It also supports the idea that the APU will be based on the Ontario architecture which is targeted at low-power and ultraportable systems.