AMD Brazos Platform Gets Hands On, More Details, Product Lineup

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9 Nov, 2010 6:04 pm

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More details on AMD’s Brazos platform, which is part of their upcoming Fusion / APU range due out early next year, has been revealed over the weekend to several tech sites which includes some hands on experiences and a product lineup. Just to refresh your memory the Brazos platform includes two APUs, or Fusion processors (combination of CPU and GPU) based on the “Bobcat” core – Ontario and Zacate. The former is intended to tackle the netbook segment and the latter, thin and light notebooks, both intended to cover devices under $500.

Here’s the Brazos platform product line up, both APUs include single and dual core models.

APU Model Bobcat Cores CPU Speed GPU Shaders GPU Speed TDP
Zacate AMD E-350 2 1.6 GHz Radeon HD 6310 80 500 MHz 18 W
AMD E-240 1 1.5 GHz Radeon HD 6310 80 500 MHz 18 W
Ontario AMD C-50 2 1.0 GHz Radeon HD 6250 80 280 MHz 9 W
AMD C-30 1 1.2 GHz Radeon HD 6250 80 280 MHz 9 W

First two Zacates are aimed at nettops and thin and lights with a $399 – $449 price range. The last two for netbooks with netbook pricing, I suppose.

Some notes (technical specs mostly not new):

  • DirectX 11 support
  • 8.5 – 9 hour “battery life” for Zacate laptops with 55 Wh batteries. (for reference AMD Nile quoted at 8 hours with 61Wh battery but delivers just under 5 hours real life usage)
  • 10.5 hours “battery life” for Ontario laptops / netbooks.
  • Single core models are actually dual core but have one core disabled. Core unlocking is “apparently possible but unexpected”.
  • Memory – two DIMMs (RAM slots) are supported on a single 64-bit channel memory controller with speeds maxing out at DDR3-1066.
  • Up to 50% graphics performance improvement over Nile platform.
  • Video – dual displays concurrently with VGA / HDMI / Display Port / DVI or LVDS.
  • Temperature – 90 F / 32 C under full load, with active cooling
  • H.264 / VC1 / DivX / Xvid playback support with UVD3.
  • I/O – up to 14 x USB 2.0 ports, 6 x SATA 6Gbps and 4 x PCI-e lanes.

Hands on – overall positive responses but not much revealed yet. The top end Zacate APU (E-350) was given out to test and power consumption never spiked above 20 W. High bit-rate 720p played well. Windows 7 felt responsive even while running some benchmarks. Most streaming HD services worked without issue. It didn’t “stray too far” from a current AMD Nile processor and a dual core Celeron SU2300 processor in terms of CPU performance.

Gaming – Crysis at 720p resolution was “enjoyable” at low settings. Apparently the 50% improvement in graphics isn’t just a best-case scenario.

More hands on experiences will be revealed next week.

Yet more demos of the Zacate APU model E-350:

YouTube Preview Image

And:

YouTube Preview Image

Source: Hardocp, Anandtech, TechReport, TechReport, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware via Engadget


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  • Anonymous

    oh ye flippin gods! And this on something that ends up inside the same ballpark as atom?!

  • Anonymous

    oh ye flippin gods! And this on something that ends up inside the same ballpark as atom?!

  • Nornene

    this is the most excited ive been about netbooks in a long long time, finally AMD has released something that is clearly a competitor to Intel Atom & CULV at 9w/18w. the BIG difference is that these will have GPU’s that simply blow away anything Intel has created.

    most people dont realize that so much of a desktop OS these days is GPU bound thats why Atom chokes on just about anything HD or even W7 UI responsiveness. even though the dualcore Atom can take some of the load it still leaves the CPU a maxed out unitasker. hell my very low power HTPC can run a full 1080p stream at less than 20% CPU & leave me plenty of power left over for other tasks.

    Atoms are a complete no-go for me these days, even with ION. many people dont even realize how slow their experience is until they get a laptop with a discrete GPU or almost anything AMD, i can never go back.

    i’ll be curious to see what Chippy, JKK, & Sascha impressions are when these begin rolling out early next year. i’m pretty sure they’ll be excited since these should breath fresh new life into the netbook market.

  • Giz

    Any rumors of possible Intel Z5XX or Z6XX competitors? I’m mostly interested in fanless UMPC type devices with 5-7 inch displays.

  • http://www.umpcportal.com chippy

    From what i’ve seen (private demo in Sept) the low-power version is a 1Ghz part. Don’t expect it to come within the power envelope of a dual-core netbook platform and don’t expect it to be as good as the demos we’re seeing which is done with a higher-power part.

  • Beggie

    i doubt most people are expecting much from the 9w Ontario, although i bet it still woops the pants off N450.

    clearly the spotlight is on the 18w Zacate which is a direct competitor to i3/i5/i7 ULV except Zacate will be packing a much better GPU. there is absolutely no way a CULV could have been pegged at 100% & still ran a 1080p through the GPU like Zacate did.

    i know you guys are sponsored by Intel so you have to be respectful, but the entire industry knows that Intel has been neglecting their integrated gfx for so long which has put them lightyears behind the competition. it might have been okay to do that in the XP days but W7 changed all of that & Atom simply cant even run the UI smoothly, CULV still stuggles at times with 1080p.

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