14 DAY TRIAL // No doubt intent on siphoning some of the attention that the GTX 580 is going to receive, AMD gave away some details on its Brazos platform, this once represented by the Zacate and Ontario accelerated processing units (APUs).
While we're patently waiting for NVIDIA to go official with its GeForce GTX 580 (something Gigabyte did not do), AMD appears to be more eager to steer attention away from it.
As one would expect, the method of choice was the release of some details concerning the upcoming Brazos platform.
This platform is based on the long awaited Fusion architecture, which will spawn various processors for both desktops and laptops.
The Brazos will include the Zacate dual-core, the Ontario single-core and the Hudson M1 'controller hub'.
HotHardware was kind enough to present a detailed description of the first two Zacate chips revealed so far, as well as a pair of Ontario chips.
The 1.6 GHz Zacate E-350 and the 1.5 GHz Ontario E-240, as part of the E series, feature 80 DirectX 11 'nanocores' as part of the on-die 500MHz Radeon HD 6310 graphics.
The Zacate 1.0GHz C-50 and the Ontario C-30 (1.2 GHz), otherwise known as the C series, come with the 280 MHz Radeon HD 6250 Graphics (80 GPU cores).
All of these are supposed to be able to overcome Intel Atom processors by a fair margin, at least according to the report.
Unfortunately, while some specs are known, the full list of performance numbers (charts, comparisons to competitors, etc.) of the CPU cores themselves has not been disclosed by the Sunnyvale, California-based company.
As end-users know by now, there is no exact launch date set for the market availability of the 40nm-based APUs, though it is known that they will begin to debut next year.
When they do, they should take on Intel's Sandy Bridge series of CPUs, which have their own Integrated Graphics, albeit they do not possess DirectX 11 capabilities.
