Product Description:

The Intel Atom boards have entered on the market a long time ago and offer enough computing power for occasional browsing, playing old games or for downloading torrents, without the concern of high power consumption; if they were also packed with an onboard Nvidia Ion, these little systems could handle without problems 720P video or occasionally 1080P; with the latest Ion2 integrated GPU, we could also play older detail-rich games, like the successful Mafia 1, as we could see in the Shuttle XS35GT review.

AMD have only recently joined this market with a so called APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), which is a CPU with embedded graphics; these APUs come in different variants: A Series (Liano), E Series (Zacate, which we will test in this review) and C Series (Ontario). AMD calls these platforms Brazos.

On the market we now have only the Zacate and Ontario CPUs (on 40nm technology); the Zacate comes with a 18W power consumption rating and the Ontario is clocked lower and has half the power consumption rating.

The CPU Cores are named Bobcat, both Zacate and Ontario come in single core and dual core variants, each with its integrated GPU (fully supporting DX11, DirectCompute and OpenCL). These APUs also come with UVD3 support, which is a dedicated hardware acceleration for HD video, which includes 1080P resolutions.

The Brazos platforms support a maximum memory speed of 1066MHz.

Product Specifications: