AMD Demos Zacate
PrintAMD’s next-generation APU will kick the ass of Core i5, the company said and demonstrated Monday – the opening day of Intel’s Developer Forum conference.
AMD publically lifted the veil on the Zacate Accelerated Processor Unit on Monday. Zacate fuses the guts of a traditional CPU with the guts of a GPU. The result of that hard work, AMD said, is a chip that consumes from 9-18 watts and out performs existing Core i5 chips in gaming. The company showed Zacate running City of Heroes: Going Rogue running like butter on a mobile development platform.
When integrated into a notebook, AMD said a $500 Zacate-based laptop will outperform an $800 Intel Core i5-based computer. The company also demonstrated the same 2.4GHz Core i5 M240 choking on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 performance demo while the Zacate could smoothly run several of the demos with 3 to 4 times the frame rate of the Intel part with integrated graphics.
AMD said notebooks using Zacate are expected to ship at end of the year to OEMs with the first products for sale early next year. It should be noted that the demo mostly demonstrates the graphics prowess of Zacate against the recognized anemic graphics performance of Intel’s Arrandale core.
Intel itself was busy detailing its next generation Sandy Bridge chip which is expected to overclock the compute cores higher than existing chips and will also overclock the graphics cores higher.
For more news from this year's Intel Developer Forum, click here!
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Peanut Fox
September 13, 2010 at 3:16pm
Why is AMD concerned about i5 chips that are over a year old? They need to set their sights higher. It's time for them to throw down the gauntlet and introduce some real competition.
QUINTIX256
September 13, 2010 at 7:22pm
In fact, the difficulty that was Barcelona was launched 3 years ago. AMD is still very competitive against intel’s sub $300 cpus. The core i5 is still very popular among typical 15.4” $700 laptops. My brother's new Toshiba has one. (My 17.3” Toshiba has an AMD P820 :-).
praetor_alpha
September 13, 2010 at 4:03pm
After all, MaxPC considers an i5 an "aging" CPU:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/home/what_kind_machine_will_run_starcraft_ii_we_find_out
Silencer
September 13, 2010 at 3:07pm
Both AMD and Intel have been working on putting GPUs into CPUs for years. AMD graphics have always smashed Intel graphics. Intel CPUs have usually smashed AMD's, except AMD's have better architecture, and better price/performance ratios.
As AMD has always had better graphics and architecture, I'm sure their parts will rock, especially for the money.
(On a side note: Hey AMD, you should probably keep the ATi brand. Read 'Positioning' by Al Ries and Jack Trout.)
avenger48
September 13, 2010 at 2:16pm
How is it as a CPU? I've seen Intel's integrated laptop graphics, and sworn to never buy a laptop without a dedicated card as a result. Thus, I don't care about the iGPU, I want to know about the CPU. Honestly, even if it has a mobility 5870 integrated, if it can't outperform a Core 2 Duo, I won't buy it.
Also, as far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a Core i5 M240.
CleverBullet
September 13, 2010 at 2:43pm
I bet the M240 is a sandy bridge chip that was just recently demoed
CleverBullet
September 17, 2010 at 10:34am
Whoops, just noticed that.
the M240 could be a typo then, i guess
Caboose
September 13, 2010 at 2:02pm
I'm a huge AMD fan. Run all AMD based systems in my home, and laptops that I buy have to have AMD graphics in them if there's even the slightest bit of gaming going to be performed. I can't wait to see some realworld benchmarks of this!
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