Stefan Mileschin

We've already covered AMD's premium Trinity processors, but today the company got specific about what we can expect from its more price-conscious E-Series chips. These are the 1.4GHz E1-1200 and the 1.7GHz E2-1800 -- both dual-core Bobcat APUs that bring a range of improvements over last year's E-series, and which are intended for sub-$600 laptops plus perhaps the odd nettop. Despite having slightly higher clock speeds than their predecessors, the new models consume the familiar 18W TDP and still manage to claim a battery life in excess of 11 hours with Windows in idle, or around four hours of solid flash gaming (as unhealthy as that sounds).

On the graphics side, the APUs contain updated Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs, which makes them DirectX 11 capable and also compatible with OpenCL 1.1, thus allowing certain software titles to use the GPU for computation tasks. Other improvements include integrated support for SATA III 6Gb/s, USB 3.0 and SD card readers, plus HTML 5 acceleration and Metro UI optimization for Windows 8. As for what distinguishes the two options: the E1-1200 can only take DDR3-1066 memory and its GPU is clocked at 500MHz, whereas the E2-1800 can take speedier DDR3-1333 memory and deliver a maximum GPU clock speed of 680MHz. As for availability, AMD expects E-Series APU-equipped machines to roll out from OEMs such as Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. Check out the slide deck below for more details or jump past the break for the full press release.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/05/amd-e-series/