AMD upcoming Ontario APU performance has recently leaked over at Hardware Info, and on the raw stats alone it looks impressive: 2x Intel’s latest Atom D510 performance, plus, a full DirectX 11 graphics core built in too – all in just an 18W power envelope!
Wow. Serious, Wow!
It should bridge the gap between Intel’s Atom and CULV, and overlap the ageing Intel Atom+ Nvidia Ion segment too.
It can get away with all this because it has AMD’s new APU ‘Fuzion‘ technology at the helm. Essentially the CPU and graphics not just on the same physical die – they are mushed together like butter and mashed potato: you can still taste the salty butter and starchy veg, but they work together better than separate foods. The inbuilt DDR3 memory controller also gets some die space too, and it’s all made using the latest, lower power 40nm process – an upgrade from 45nm in AMD’s current CPUs.
This means that unlike Intel’s Atom, CULV or Nvidia’s Ion parts that need two extra chips – it only needs a single low power ‘southbridge’ chip to connect up a hard drive, USB and PCI-Express bits to make a complete system.
Altogether this means AMD’s upcoming APU should fit inside devices as small as 10 inches, through 12 and 13 inches, covering ‘ultra portable’, through to ‘ultra-thin’ markets giving us a long sought missing ingredient: variety and consumer choice.
Right now we have been pretty much limited to buying Atom derivative netbooks for the last a few years – certainly almost Intel exclusive, apart from a brief liaison with AMD’s Neo by a few manufacturers. Intel’s CULV never dropped below the 12 inch market, and while the Intel Atom suffices for basic web browsing, social media, office work and youtube, with increasingly visual rich OS’ and internet services, having a more umpf at your disposal is definitely a good thing.
AMD’s Ontario should arrive late Q4 with laptops and netbooks – including designs by ASUS – are rumoured to appear during Q1 next year. We certainly hope to see some new Eee PCs, as it would reinvigorate a market that has had its ‘cuteness and sexiness’ sucked out by the tablet revolution. That said, the two are not interchangable and each has its place – and with a deluge of tablets also due in Q1 as well, it’s going to be a cracking and extremely expensive time to be a technophile!
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