AMD joins Intel’s MeeGo OS effort

In an effort to expand software compatibility for its upcoming Fusion chips, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Monday joined rival Intel’s efforts to develop the open-source MeeGo OS. 

AMD “will provide engineering expertise intended to help establish the technical foundations for next-generation mobile platforms and embedded devices,” the company said in a blog post on its website. Joining the development effort could help expand market opportunities for its Fusion chips, the company said.

The announcement was made at the MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin.

Intel Corp. and Nokia Corp. in February announced MeeGo, which is a lightweight OS designed for low-power computers, handhelds and embedded devices. Development efforts are being managed by The Linux Foundation.

The OS already works with x86 chips, making it compatible with AMD’s existing processors. But AMD early next year plans to release a new family of chips called Fusion, which merge the CPU and graphics processor onto one chip. The company is initially aiming at netbooks with the chip and the company last week also said that future Fusion chips will go into tablets. 

With help from operating systems, Fusion chips will achieve the processing power of graphics processing units to speed up applications such as imaging or video. The chips are already compatible with Microsoft’s DirectX 11, a set of tools that can offload tasks to GPUs to speed up application performance. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome offload tasks such as rendering HTML 5 or Flash video content to GPUs and Mozilla’s Firefox 4, now in beta, also has that capability.