Digital Home Thoughts: Behold AMD's Beauty That is the APU!

"The low power Zacate and Ontario Series of APUs were launched yesterday with the higher-end Llano coming towards the middle of 2011. Announced back in September,the Zacate Series is comprised of two APUs, the E240 and the E350 - the former being a single core 1.5GHz processor while the latter is a dual-core 1.6GHz APU. Both of these have a TDP of 18watts – which represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system requires."

I suppose it was inevitable; computing has been migrating towards kitchen-sink-on-a-chip technology for many years now. The fact that many computing tasks have somewhat peaked has not helped the situation either. Going back two or more decades, I remember where computers had a separate CPU, FPU, video card, sound card, I/O card and drive controller. The FPU was quickly merged in with the CPU, along with I/O functions (anyone remember the days when the 16550 UART was coveted for high *cough* speed dial-up connections?) and the drive controller. Then sound and video got integrated into the motherboard as well. It seems that the whole family residing on the motherboard is not enough anymore, and it all pretty much needs to be packed into a single chip. There are some benefits, of course, as it allows for better performance and smaller computers with less power draw, but I think I will miss the days when I was able to pick and choose what parts went into my computer.