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Leaked AMD roadmap reveals Desna APU, bona fide tablet strategy
What's a chip maker to do after successfully hawking five million of its Fusion APUs? Why, expand the line, of course! A leaked slide deck from within the lairs of AMD is showing off quite a bit of the company's upcoming roadmap, and while a good deal of it has already been made public in one way or another, there's one term that's causing all sorts of buzz -- and for good reason. Desna is the name to know, a Z-Series APU that's aimed squarely at the tablet form factor. To date, only a handful of chips have managed to slide into slates, and while we always reckoned that a version of Fusion could really give those ARM-based alternatives a run for their money, it wasn't clear if AMD actually had one that would handle the power and heat requirements. Based on these sheets -- dated this month, for what it's worth -- the Z-Series chip will offer Flash compatibility, DirectX 11 support and IE9 / HTML5 acceleration, and that's just for starters. Head on down to the links below for the full skinny, but make sure you grab a cup of joe and unplug the line first. You'll need a few, to say the least.
AMD announces first Fusion chips: 10+ hour battery life with DirectX11 graphics
Is this real? Is this happening? It's been over four years since AMD and ATI completed their $5.4 billion merger with the promise of Fusion hybrid CPU / GPU chips, and after what's seemed like nearly endless delays, the company's delivering here at CES 2011. And it's delivering in a big way -- the first Fusion chips are a direct assault on Intel's Atom and the netbook market, offering what AMD says is better CPU performance, vastly better GPU performance with DirectX11 support, dedicated 1080p HD video processing and HDMI out, and "all day" battery life that can hit 10 or more hours. There are four total chips in two families built around the new "Bobcat" CPU core to start: the "Zacate" E-Series for mainstream laptops, AIOs and small desktops will have an 18W TDP and come in the 1.6GHz dual-core E-350 and the 1.5GHz single-core E-240, while the "Ontario" C-Series for HD netbooks and "other emerging form factors" will clock in at 9W TDP and come in the dual-core 1.0GHz C-50 and the single core 1.2GHz C-30. The "Llano" A-Series designed for mainstream laptops will offer up to four cores and arrive later this year. We're expecting to see a number of systems based around the E-Series -- the Lenovo X120e and HP Pavilion dm1 have already been announced -- and we're anticipating quite a flood in the days ahead, which we're more than eager to test out. AMD's making some serious claims -- it says "Fusion processors are, quite simply, the greatest advancement in processing since the introduction of the x86 architecture more than forty years ago" -- and if can deliver on its performance promises, it'll pretty much turn the entire netbook market upside down. What's more, the company says tablets and other embedded devices are coming in the first half of 2011, so things could get seriously interesting. PR after the break.
AMD teases Bobcat Fusion APUs again, delivers Atom-busting performance (video)
A quick refresher: Bobcat is AMD's low-power Accelerated Processing Unit that can handle both computational and graphical duties, Ontario and Zacate are the chips built upon that core, and Brazos is the overall platform that they'll be doing their work on. Clear enough? We hope so. AMD has finally allowed a few tech pubs to get their hands on Brazos-based systems and, along with feedback about their experience, the guys have come back with some added spec notes. There'll be two initial Zacate options, the dual-core E-350 running at 1.6GHz or the single-core E-240 clocked at 1.5GHz, while Ontario will offer 1GHz dual-core and 1.2GHz single-core variants. Let's not forget that both are intended for netbooks and lithe desktop computers before writing them off as too slow -- which would be a mistake anyway as the sites that got a chance to play with the E-350 reported very respectable performance. HardOCP dared to try out Crysis and managed to get it chugging along at a resolution around 720p, whereas Hot Hardware witnessed a 1080p video clip being played back perfectly smoothly alongside an instance of Hyper Pi maxing out the CPU load. Benchmark results will have to wait for another day, but feel free to peruse the links below for a more detailed breakdown of the new architecture.
