Anandtech Previews AMD’s Brazos/Zacate Platform (Fusion)

Update: AMD is shipping Fusion APUs

It’s been nearly two months since AMD’s Ontario and Zacate APUs were previewed and today Anandtech posted a comprehensive preview of the system. Anandtech wasn’t allowed to reveal performance benchmarks (sometime next week hopefully), but they are able to talk about the first actual configurations that will be shipping on AMD Fusion.

Fusion is very aptly named – it’s the fusing of the CPU and and an ATI GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) into what AMD is calling an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). In the ultraportable and netbook market, it has a lot of advantages. It’s a very low-power platform in the form of what AMD is calling the Bobcat platform. There will be higher performance platforms for larger laptops and notebooks later on.

Their impressions seem positive – one of the systems tested appeared to be similar to an 11-inch form factor and “felt quick” and they felt it was comparable to an 11-inch MacBook Air.

Keep in mind that the performance is above the existing Intel Atoms and somewhere around or below the Intel Core i3, and the price should be very favorable. It’s competing with NVIDIA’s Ion platform as well. There will be both single-core and dual-core versions available.

Dual-Core AMD Brazos
– AMD E-350, 1.6GHz, Radeon HD 6310
– AMD C-50, 1.0GHz, Radeon HD 6250

Single-core AMD Brazos
– AMD E-240, 1.5GHz, Radeon HD 6310
– AMD C-30, 1.2GHz, Radeon HD 6250

Both of the E-series APUs have a GPU clock speed of 500MHz and a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 18W, while the C-series APUs have a GPU clock speed of 280MHz and are running at cool 9W TDP.

It’s a good overview of the upcoming systems from AMD and worth a read if you have a few minutes.

Read: Anandtech