Brazos will be AMD’s new mobile processor platform and is expected to launch by the end of 2010 to appear in large amounts starting next year. The company has released more information to the public, including the mobile APUs Ontario and Zacate.
Ontario and Zacate is paired with the new AMD chipset – now called Fusion Controller Hub (FCH) – dubbed Hudson that will bring nice functionality to even the most slim notebooks. SATA 6,0 Gbps, loads of USB 2.0 ports, low power consumption and eight PCI Express 2.0 lanes for connecting CPU and discrete cards.
AMD has revealed more details on the four processor models that will be available. Ontario and Zacate is on the transistor level identical and made with TSMC’s 40nm technology. The circuits measure only 19x19mm and power consumption will be 9 watt and 19 watt respectively where the more efficient Ontario will settle for lower clock frequencies on both CPU and GPU. The four APUs will be found in notebooks and mini-desktops;
| APU Model | CPU cores | CPU clock freq. | GPU (Radeon) | GPU cores | GPU clock freq. | TDP |
| AMD E-350 | 2 | 1.6GHz | HD 6310 | 80 | 500MHz | 18W |
| AMD E-240 | 1 | 1.5GHz | HD 6310 | 80 | 500MHz | 18W |
| AMD C-50 | 2 | 1.0GHz | HD 6250 | 80 | 280MHz | 9W |
| AMD C-30 | 1 | 1.2GHz | HD 6250 | 80 | 280MHz | 9W |
AMD E series is based on Zacate while the AMD C series uses Ontario and it looks like it will be the circuit to go up against Intel Atom in the netbook segment. With 80 stream processors in the integrated DirectX 11 graphics circuits the performance looks promising. The top model AMD E-350 is limited by only by its single-channel DDR3 memory controller and should otherwise offer GPU performance on par with AMD Radeon HD 5450 that also ships with 80 stream processors.
AMD will release the first benchmarks soon and we are certainly looking forward to a comparison with Intel Atom. AMD has the superior architecture on paper, but Intel has the clock frequencies on its side for the CPU performance.
More on the Brazos platform at Anandtech.com.
