AMD's new 1.6GHz Zacate E350 chip is the first low power chip based on the company's new Bobcat CPU core. It's also the first APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) from AMD, which is a fancy way of saying it's part of the AMD Fusion line of products which put the CPU and graphics onto a single chip. We already knew that Zacate chips would provide more processing power and significantly better graphics performance than Intel's Atom chips… now we have a better idea of just how much more.
A number of tech news sites have published benchmarks and real-world test results for the new AMD Zacate chip.
The dual core chip uses less than 18W of power, but according to Legit Reviews, it can handle multitasking like a champ, while playing 1080p HD video. Hot Hardware ran a series of benchmarks and found that in most tests the chip was generally a little faster than a system with a dual core Intel Atom D525 chip and NVIDIA ION 2 graphics, but not nearly as fast as an AMD Turion II Neo K625 dual core processor, which is also more power-hungry than the other two chips. On the other hand, the Zacate chip got some of the highest scores on the tests of graphics processing performance.
Overall, it sounds like the Zacate chip could give Intel's Atom D5xx series a serious run for the money in the nettop and low power laptop space. I'm still curious to see how AMD's upcoming Ontario chips, which are aimed at netbooks and tablets compare to the Zacate chips.
You can find a roundup of some other benchmarks and reviews of the Zacate chips at Engadget.
AMD Bobcat chips: Faster than a speeding Atom is a post from: Liliputing
Posts
