Following AMD's recent announcement of a tie-up with Apple over supply of ATI Radeon graphics processors to be pre-fitted on iMac and Mac Pro product lines, news is surfacing that the engagement between the two will get even deeper. The next version of Apple TV will feature AMD's Fusion APU (accelerated processing units), making it the first Apple product to use an AMD processor. An APU is technically identical to the Intel Core i3 or Core i5 dual-core processors found in the market today (that have the CPU and an IGP in the same package), except that the first Fusion APUs will have the processor cores and an ATI Radeon GPU on the same die, and more importantly, the GPU will be DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 compliant, and have performance on par with the ATI Radeon HD 5500 series discrete GPUs.

For Apple TV this means that it will have a GPU that's powerful enough to run a more complex, higher resolution user interface, and make use of AMD's advanced HD video acceleration features, while literally 60% of the vital components are contained within one chip (CPU, IMC, GPU, northbridge). Apple TV is a device that plugs into HDTVs, providing interactive TV and video streaming features over the iTunes store service. It can also connect to your media collection over a wireless network.