AMD’s successor to the successful Brazos platform has run into problems and been replaced by a new platform called Brazos 2.0. As the name implies it will not bring any major performance improvements, but it is the chipset that has been lifted.
AMD seems to have run into serious problems with the new Deccan platform that holds the new APUs Krishna and Wichita. The news about these would be up to four Bobcat cores, better graphics and integrated southbridge – that would make use of TSMC’s 28nm node. Exactly what happened is not clear, but since this would be AMD’s first attempt to integrate CPU, GPU, northbridge and southbrige on the same piece of silicon it is not unlikely that something came up with the design.
The replacement for Deccan comes as a bit of a disappointment – Brazos 2.0. Brazos 2.0 will be introduced together with two new APUs that looks to be the exact same that are on the market today, but with higher clock frequencies.
If the information is correct there will be no 28nm APUs from AMD until late 2012.
E1-1200 sports two cores at 1.4 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache and Radeon HD 7310 graphics with 80 Radeon cores at 500 MHz – basically E-350 with 200 MHz lower clocked processor. E2-1800 gets two cores at 1.7 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache with Radeon HD 7340 graphics at 523 MHz, with up to 680 MHz Turbo mode. Both APUs gets a TDP at 18W and will be made at TSMC with its tested 40nm technology.
The news in Brazos 2.0 is instead the southbridge “Hudson D3L” A68M. It supports two SATA 6.0 Gb/s and two USB 3.0 ports, unlike the current A50M chipset that supports six SATA 6.0 Gb/s and no USB 3.0 ports. The reason it has reduced the number of SATA ports is to reduce energy consumption in notebooks that Brazos 2.0 targets. Brazos 2.0 will launch in the middle of February.
According other sources this both good and bad news. The bad is of course that AMD will use the same product during the majority of 2012 as in 2011, which won’t look good with tough competition from both Intel and ARM-based devices. But AMD will instead launch Deccan’s planed successor Samara. AMD moves from one kitty to another since Samara will contain a fresher Bobcat core named Jaguar.
A lot has happened at AMD lately, it hired a new VP and a large amount of people have had to go, or left on their own. It doesn’t look like we can trust older roadmaps from AMD since the company is going through a reconstruction. The seccessor to Llano will be released earlier than expected, and the sucessors to both Bulldozer and Brazos have been scrapped. Hopefully we will get some clarity into AMD’s workings after the Analyst Day in February. The only thing we can say for certain is that Intel and the market is not slowing down to wait for AMD.
Source: XbitLabs
