AMD’s Zacate APU and Brazos Platform Reviewed

49147J_X2_APU_pencil_120x100.png

While at CES, Mikinho and I had a chance to sit down with AMD and left impressed with the promise of their new Zacate Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) and Brazos platform. If you’re not familiar with AMD’s Zacate, it is a new entrant designed to compete in the small form factor (SFF) and notebook PC markets.

The APU, as AMD likes to call it, combines CPU and GPU onto a single die designed for both performance and power-efficiency. We think it could form a great nucleus for SFF home theater PCs (HTPC) and hope to get a system in for review to reveal its capabilities in an HTPC. In the meantime, check out the review over at X-bit Labs.

The first new product from AMD that should get the company back to the route of success is the totally new processor family using Bobcat microarchitecture. They are targeted for netbooks and nettops, which is the market where AMD hasn’t been represented at all before. However, will AMD manage to revolutionize this market and push aside Intel Atom and Nvidia ION? Let’s find out!

X-bit Labs