AMD's New Fusion APUs Crush Atom in Early Benchmarks

From DailyTech: AMD several years back entered a phase where it was full of big talk, but delivered very little. Then a couple of years ago it began to turn the corner, with its aggressive delivery of the Radeon 4000 series, 5000 series, and 6000 series allowing it to regain the lead in the discrete GPU market.

Now the company looks to follow-up on those successes, unleashing an intriguing new platform the netbook/ultra-mobile market. Intel's Atom processor has long dominated this segment thanks to its low price Atom processors. Atom's CPU performance has always been relatively good, but the performance of Intel's integrated GPUs is pretty abysmal.

AMD's new low-power platform Brazos goes for the throat, attacking Atom where it's weakest -- graphics. AMD has announced four upcoming models, which are already shipping to OEMs and should pop up in netbooks, notebooks, and other form factors by January/February 2011 at the latest.

The E-xxx processors are parts in the Zacate series, while the C-xxx parts belong to the Ontario series, which is more heavily aimed at ultraportables. Together these parts collectively belong to the Brazos family.

Prices have not been announced, but AMD is rumored to be targeting the cheaper dual-core D510 part ($63/unit @ 1k) with its E-350. Costs for a Brazos notebook are estimated by AMD to be well under $500, with rumors that they might be in the sub $400 range, even.

When comparing between architectures clock speed and core counts are generally poor judges of performance. The E-350 is 1.6 GHz, but it is actually slower than the dual-core 1.3 GHz Athlon Neo K325 or a single-core Athlon V120 2.2GHz with a 512KB L2 cache. But according to Anandtech, AMD's E-350 has cut the average core power draw when active by 40 percent from its previous gen Nile (Athlon V120) platform.

When it comes to the GPU, though, the comparison to the integrated GPUs on AMD's previous platforms -- Nile (Athlon V120) and Danube (Athlon Neo) -- isn't even close. The Brazos GPU blows away the past competitors.

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