AMD has been talking about 2011 and its first Fusion product codenamed Llano simply because all that it has in 2010 are slightly improved dual and quad K10.5 45nm cores. Since Deneb is not enough to fight Intel’s offering AMD needs to talk about 2011 and its new lineup.

AMD was kind enough to confirm that sampling of Llano processors to partners should happen in first half of 2010 which implies that it should happen in late June at the latest. If AMD slips the schedule it can happen even later but this is the current plan.

Public relation representatives even said that Llano should be available from OEMs in 2011, but it didn’t specify in which part. We would be surprised to see these products really early in 2011, but we have been surprised before. Intel’s Sandy Bridge, the first monolithic core with graphics, memory controller and CPU on the same chip, is coming also in 2011 but Intel has dared to inform partners that its chip is coming in Q1 2011.

The game is on and with AMD’s Llano you will at least get some decent gaming performance, at least we hope.