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All posts tagged "apu"


Monday, February 28, 2011

How The E-350 Stacks Up

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 11:30 AM

http://techreport.com/articles.x/20401

"I'll admit it. We are about to commit a terrible crime against the holy writ of product segmentation. We're about to consider the merits of AMD's Brazos and Intel's Pine Trail—incredibly small, low-power, and inexpensive PC platforms—versus a whole range of full-grown desktop CPUs, a ridiculously unfair and inappropriate endeavor if ever there was one."

The results that Tech Report posts should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. It should be obvious to almost anyone that the AMD E-350 will not be able to really compete against the likes of the latest generation desktop processors; it was never designed to. It does show that AMD finally has something with which to compete against Intel with its Atom CPU. Paired with a stronger GPU, it also means that Intel has some challenges in front of it, and its relationship with NVidia has become much more important. Sure, Intel might think that higher powered GPU is overkill right now, but it definitely seems to becoming an increasingly important part of computing. Especially with GPGPU acceleration becoming much more commonplace.


Monday, January 31, 2011

AMD's 5 Watt CPU Wants to Be In Your Next Windows Tablet

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts News" @ 10:53 PM

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/31/...blet-of-choice/

Engadget has a brief news item that says AMD has a 5 watt version of their Fusion APU (that's a CPU plus a GPU for those of you who haven't been paying attention lately) designed for x86 tablets. Meaning, tablets and slates running Windows. With Microsoft's move to port Windows to ARM, is AMD too late? I don't think so - there's a pressing need for low-power hardware to run Windows in a variety of form factors, and x86 compatibility it still critical for application use. What I haven't seen anyone do yet is do a power consumption comparison between AMD's new low-power APUs and the comparable offering from Intel in the form of an Atom CPU and an Intel HD GPU. I'd guess AMD would win that, but I'd like to know for sure. Anyone seen anything like that yet?


Thursday, January 6, 2011

Behold AMD's Beauty That is the APU!

Posted by Hooch Tan in "Digital Home News" @ 04:00 PM

http://www.trustedreviews.com/cpu-m...ries-Of-APUs/p1

"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.


Wednesday, October 20, 2010

AMD's Llano APU Brings the Firepower

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home News" @ 08:00 PM

http://blogs.amd.com/fusion/2010/10...-fusion-at-tfe/

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's true in sports, just as it is in technology. An accelerated processing unit (APU) is more than just a CPU + GPU. Much more. And, AMD Fusion is more than just a technology product supported by software and hardware vendors. AMD Fusion is about an entire ecosystem changing the computing landscape as we know it."

I've been hearing about AMD's combination CPU/GPU since mid 2008 and it's finally becoming a reality - well, sometime in 2011 at least. The performance looks impressive, so as long as the power consumption and heat are held in check, this could be an impressive piece of hardware.


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