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One of the themes of this week's gadget-fest, Computek in Taiwan, will be devices that combine the power of a notebook with features of a tablet. Intel is pushing its 'ultrabook' concept, but the chip that looks best suited to the 'souped-up netbook' is the AMD Fusion family of midrange, integrated apps processors. And while speculation continues to swirl that the x86 vendor will embrace ARM for mobile products, for now it is poised to extend Fusion to tablets.

According to a corporate presentation leaked to the Android Community site, AMD is working on a new Fusion model specifically targeting touchscreen tablets. Codenamed Desna, but officially to be called Fusion Z-Series, this will boost battery life to 10.5 hours, but will still have enough processing horsepower to drive HD video, according to the slides.

This may well be the first result of a change of strategy at AMD, which accompanied the departure of its CEO Dirk Meyer in January. A key element of the new approach is to pay more attention to mobile, non-keyboard devices, notably tablets - though AMD still appears to be steering clear of smartphones. The new direction, and broad hints from some executives, have led to expectations that it will introduce an ARM-based line in future. It is clearly not waiting for that transition to go after tablets though, though details on Z-Series - including its timescales - remain scarce, so we are unlikely to see commercial products until next year.

Already, Fusion has turned around AMD's fortunes in the netbook and low end notebook segments. The vendor said it sold 5m units in the first five months of the year, a figure which, by Mick's calculations, gave it about one-third of the netbook processor market. Although, according to Microsoft, that sector had suffered a 40% year-on-year drop in the first quarter, this is still remarkable progress for AMD, which had, pre-Fusion, managed to take only a minor share from Atom in this area. With the stage set for generation two netbooks, AMD is well placed to cash in second time around - and to push Fusion into cloudbooks and any other mobile PC form factors that gain acceptance. Its products sit somewhere between Intel's Atom and Sandy Bridge in terms of price/performance.

While AMD may have strong prospects in netbooks and other extensions of the PC, on the tablet front, it will be an outsider, particularly if it remains focused on Windows. It has reportedly been hiring Android engineers, so it may optimize the Z-Series for the Google OS as well as Windows, but it is also possible that it will have a dual tablet processor strategy, dipping its toes into the ARM waters in order to support truly mobile Android devices.

Intel has its own tablet platform, Oak Trail, which supports Windows, Android (Froyo and Gingerbread, with Honeycomb in the works), and MeeGo.

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