The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
AMD has been curiously absent from the value netbook and nettop segments since Atom’s arrival nearly three years ago. These markets are highly profitable only for component vendors, as the OEMs that sell netbooks and nettops must survive on very slim margins in order to hit aggressive price points. It wasn’t too long ago that we were shocked by $699 desktop PCs, but to now be able to get a fully functioning portable PC with display at below $300 is impressive. In order for the profit equation to work out however, you can’t simply scale down a larger chip - you need an architecture targeted specifically at the type of very light workloads you expect to encounter in these segments. Underclocking and undervolting an architecture targeted at high end desktops or servers won’t cut it.
AMD came to the same realization. For it to compete in these value markets, AMD couldn’t rely on its existing Phenom II derived architectures. The Phenom II and its relatives currently span a range of TDPs from 9W to 140W, and at the lower end of that spectrum we’re talking about some very low clock speeds and performance targets. Getting down to 1W was out of the question without a separate design.
What AMD came up with was a core called Bobcat, initially targeted for netbooks, notebooks, nettops and entry level desktops. Architecturally Bobcat is a significant step ahead of Atom: while still dual-issue, it features an out-of-order execution engine making it the Pentium Pro to Atom’s Pentium.
It isn’t just CPU architecture that AMD surpassed Atom with, the first incarnation of Bobcat is an integrated SoC with on-die DirectX 11 GPU. AMD calls this combination a Fusion APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) as it places both a CPU and GPU on a single die. Read on for our full review of AMD's first Fusion part: the E-350.
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This Just In: LG Optimus 2X, Our First Tegra 2 Smartphone
It's been 22 days since we saw the Tegra 2 packing LG Optimus 2X at CES, and just moments ago the device arrived at our doorsteps ready for a thorough reviewing. It's out of the box and charging now, ready to enter our battery life tests, but before that we managed to grab a bunch of photos and a few quick benchmarks.
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Biden Pushes Congress to Boost Electric Car Tax Credits
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Scientists Overcome Major Hurdle to Manufacturing Full-Spectrum Solar Cells
Vapor deposition process will allow for less expensive mass production of the cells, LEDs
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Results are rather mixed, and can be viewed either optimistically or pessimistically
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Rat Memory Enhanced with Naturally Occurring Growth Factor
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