AMD’s Llano platform has been on our radar for more than two years, and finally, the company has come clean with its latest class of hybrid CPU / GPU chips, officially dubbed the Fusion A-Series. Unlike the low-power flavor of Fusion accerlated processing units already on the market, these 32-nanometer APUs were designed with desktops and mainstream laptops in mind, taking direct aim at Intel’s Core 2011 processors with the promise of superior processing and discrete-level graphics, and 10-plus hours of battery life.

Aside from the assorted performance and battery life claims the company is making (much more on that in a moment), what this means is that as far as laptops go, AMD is completely stepping away from the standalone-CPU-plus-GPU paradigm. But, the company will still make dedicated Radeon cards, which can be coupled with an APU for a 75 percent boost in graphics performance — a setup AMD is calling “Dual Graphics.” All told, these chips measure just 228 square millimeters.

A-Series-equipped PCs are already shipping, and AMD says we can expect to see at least 150 of them this year. The A-Series includes seven laptop APUs across three families, and offers up to 4MB of cache and clock speeds as high as 1.9GHz in the dual-core A4 chips — up to 2.5 GHz if you take into account AMD’s Turbo Core technology. These chips are also stereoscopic 3D-capable, and support for USB 3.0, DirectX 11, OpenCL / OpenGL, AMD Wireless Display, and both 1600MHz DDR3 and low-power 1333MHz DDR3L memory.

AMD isn’t shying away from direct comparisons with Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs. The APUs promise more than ten and a half hours of resting battery life with the help of power gating, and AMD makes the pointed claim that its quad-core A8-3510MX APU can last more than three and a half hours longer than a dual-core Core i5-2410M processor. And the explicit one-upmanship doesn’t end there. AMD also says that its dual-core A4 chips will compete with Core i3 CPUS, with the quad-core A6 going after i3 and i5, and the quad-core A8 taking on i5 and i7. Systems with the A4, A6, and A8 chips are expected to start around $499, $599, and $699, respectively.

Graphics-wise, the A-Series has up to 400 shader cores, depending on the model, and ushers in two additions to AMD’s Vision Engine: AMD Perfect Picture HD, which cleans up 1080p video post-processing, and AMD Steady Video, which compensates camera shake in movies.