AMD Zacate and Ontario APUs Part of Vision Platform, No New Brands Planned

It seems that consumers no longer pay as much attention to the brands of CPUs as they used to, so Advanced Micro Devices figured it wouldn't bother giving names to its new APUs, settling, instead, for making them all part of the Vision family.

The AMD Vision Technology brand is one that was initially introduced back on 2009.

It included several classes of PCs, each class defined by certain performance parameters, like Vision Premium-labeled notebooks, which were the best mobile PCs AMD had at the time.

Starting next year, the Sunnyvale, California-based outfit will renounce the rest of the CPU-defined branding system in favor of this arguably simpler one.

One could probably say that the advancements on the video card market are one of the main reason for this decision.

Originally, CPUs were the main element that defined a PC's capabilities, but video cards got more and more relevant as games focused on visual effect.

Still, AMD and Intel found use in branding their chips (Athlon, Phenom, Semporn etc.), because said names could be sued as guidelines as to what customers might expect as far as overall performance went.

"Ontario and Zacate will come to market under the 'AMD Vision Technology' brand," said Godfrey Cheng, the director of client technology unit at AMD, in an interview with X-bit labs.

What this means is that, unlike the CPUs so far launched, the APUs (accelerated processing units) from the Ontario and Zacate platforms won't actually have names,

Instead, the systems they power will boast AMD Vision platform logotypes that will be used to identify features and performance levels.

As such, one can expect to no longer see the Athlon, Sempron, Turion or Phenom brands on their laptops starting in 2011.

All in all, Advanced Micro Devices seems to be more or less against the so-called platformization trend that appears to have taken over the PC industry.