WHAT IS AN APU?
An APU, or Accelerated Processing unit, is a chip that integrates a CPU and a GPU on the same die. The main advantages are improved data transfer rates between the components and a reduced power consumption.
The AMD Fusion family is AMD’s first attempt at an APU, and combines the Northbridge, the CPU, and the graphics chip in a single die. It is actually quite amazing what AMD has packaged together onto the tiny Fusion die.
At launch, AMD has two different Fusion APU’s: the 9 Watt “C-series” APU codenamed Ontario and the 18 Watt “E-series” APU codenamed Zacate. The GIGABYTE motherboard we are reviewing here is powered by the Zacate chip. These two APU series will be followed by the A-series APUs in Q2 2011, codenamed Llano. Llano is supposed to be more targeted towards performance users as it has between 2-10 K10 cores instead of the Bobcat cores used in the Ontario and Zacate APUs.
While the low power consumption mainly is useful for laptops, AMD still also thinks that the Ontario and Zacate are useful for All-in-one desktop computers and ultra-small form factor computers, which should produce as little heat as possible.
Even though these are low-powered products, it doesn’t mean that manufacturers have to compromise when it comes to features. The APU’s fully support DirectX 11, DirectCompute (Microsoft programming interface for GPU computing) and OpenCL (a cross-platform programming interface standard for multi-core x86 and accelerated GPU computing). Both also include UVD dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video including 1080p resolutions.
What about Sandy Bridge? Well, technically Sandy Bridge also is an APU. It is interesting to see AMD target low-end processor markets with their APU, whereas Intel targets the high-end with Sandy Bridge. To our knowledge, Intel will not release a Sandy Bridge APU that competes with these low-end APU’s, instead leaving the Atom family for that market.
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