14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's quite serious about its family of Fusion APUs, both Ontario and Zacate, and it really seems that the company wants to turn them into some full-fledged money makers by targeting a very affordable price point, so affordable that even the systems using these APUs will be quite cheap. So, as Xbit Labs informs us, it seems that AMD hopes to achieve a 350 US dollars price point for the notebooks built on the Ontario and Zacate platforms, which, as far as we're concerned, would pretty much instantly turn them into hit products, especially during this particular period of time, when consumers are not keen on overspending.
As some of you might know quite well already, the new APUs by AMD belong to the Brazos platform, that should outperform the Intel Atom in quite a number of applications, delivering not only an enhanced computing power, but also a DirectX 11 graphics engine and support for general-purpose computing on the GPU.
As a quick backgrounder, the AMD Brazos platform for desktops and mobile computers will consist of AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) code-named Ontario/Zacate as well as code-named Hudson D1 fusion controller hub, which will connect to processor using PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus and will support 4 PCIe x1 ports, PCI bus, 6 Serial ATA-300 ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports as well as integrated clock-generator.
Since RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and certain other features won't be available on the platform itself, system integrators will probably have to add certain extra chips to the Brazos platform in order to come up with complete, market-ready systems.
Of course, it remains to be seen just how soon the aforementioned companies will manage to out the first market-ready units, but without any doubt, AMD Fusion Brazos will erupt on the market over the course of 2011, with some potentially disruptive effects on the current status-quo.