The Fusion machine has started
AMD is officially launching the Brazos platform today.
AMD Fusion's first products represent the Brazos platform. One version is Ontario, which has a maximum power consumption of 9 watts. Here we can mention two specific models, one is the dual-core C-50 with its 1,0 GHz clock signal and the Radeon 280 graphics unit ticking at 6250 MHz. The other is Ontario’s single-core C-30, where the clock signal has changed to 1,2 GHz, but the rest have not changed.
Going a level up, we come across a product line called Zacate. Also included are two APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), one of which is the current flagship, the E-350 with two CPU cores and a Radeon 6310 graphics unit. The former is clocked at 1,6 GHz and the latter at 500 MHz. The second competitor is the E-240, which now has only one CPU core operating at 1,5 GHz. For Zacate, the TDP class rose from 9 Watts to 18 Watts.
All representatives of the Brazos platform can be said to have a tile width of only 75 mm2, Contains 380 million transistors and is built on 40nm production lines, and the processor cores are built around the x86 Bobcat architecture. A CPU core has 512 kB of second-level cache (L2 Cache), and supported instruction sets include SSE1, SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3. The graphics unit includes 80 stream processors and a 64-bit memory controller capable of handling DDR3-type chips at clock speeds up to 1066 MHz. The platform also includes a control bridge called Hudson, which, in addition to integrated audio codecs, offers six SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) and 14 USB 2.0 ports and 4 PCI-E channels.
Going further, the fact that all of them got the UVD 3 engine that was introduced on the table line, the Radeon 6800s, is not a negligible aspect either. This allows the Ontario and Zacate units to cope with HD resolution without any problems, and even uses hardware deceleration for DivX / Xvid videos using a decoder. In addition to videos, the Radeon graphics accelerator is also useful for Internet content, as in addition to Flash and H.264, it can also decode fresh VP8 content and, last but not least, WebGL. The list of technologies is still not over, as in addition to DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0, and DirectCompute 5.0 are also part of the repertoire. With this, Brazos is absolutely technologically excellent, as it knows all manufacturer-independent standards. AMD focuses on fresh APUs primarily for netbooks, ultra-thin notebooks, and netboards. After CES, the machines built around Brazos are likely to arrive in crowds, as AMD has negotiated with the following manufacturers so far: Acer, Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba.
AMD also made its own short video for the official launch:
