Event Coverage

AMD Announces New Brazos 2.0 APUs, Reiterates Benefits of Trinity

By Kenny Yeo - 6 Jun 2012

AMD Announces New Brazos 2.0 APUs, Reiterates Benefits of Trinity

AMD Announces New Brazos 2.0 APUs, Reiterates Importance of Trinity

According to AMD, Taiwan is one of the most important places for the computing industry. With many OEMs and big computing names based here in Taiwan, it is easy to see why. Hence, that is why AMD chose Computex 2012 as the venue and time to release their newest E-Series APUs.

Rory Read, President and CEO of AMD, posing with the new Brazos 2.0 APU.

Dubbed “Brazos 2.0”, the new 2012 E-Series APUs are an update to AMD’s most successful notebook processor platform ever. To be precise, AMD is launching two new APUs today and according to AMD, these are just some of the benefits the new APUs will offer:

  • Up to 11 hours of battery life
  • Windows 8 optimized - Metro UI
  • AMD Radeon 7000 Series graphics with DirectX 11 compatibility
  • Improved video experience
  • USB 3.0 ports

The two new E-Series APUs are based on the Bobcat core, which means these are still 40nm parts and which is why they will have a maximum TDP of 18W. Here’s a quick look at their specs:

APU Model
CPU Cores
CPU Clock L2 Cache Memory Support Radeon GPU GPU Cores GPU Clock (base/max)
E2-1800

2

1.7GHz

1MB

DDR3-1333
DDR3L-1333
DDR3U-1066

HD 7340

80

523MHz / 680MHz

E1-1200

2

1.4GHz

1MB

DDR3-1333
DDR3L-1333
DDR3U-1066

 HD 7310

80

 500MHz

 

The Benefits of Trinity

The E-Series are of course AMD’s entry-level APUs, so the company also took some time to talk about their recently released second-generation A-Series APUs, Trinity. In our in-depth analysis of Trinity, we found that it offers significantly more performance per watt than its predecessor and that it also has pretty impressive graphics performance while maintaining decent CPU computing capabilities.

Lisa Su, AMD's SVP and General Manager, Global Business Units, spoke at length about how AMD's second-generation APUs will meld traditional form factors.

AMD believes that it is with Trinity that the industry will see interesting developments taking place. Touted as the only quad-core processor available with discrete-levels of graphics performance, AMD says that Trinity will enable all new form factors and at more affordable price points. Especially since unlike Intel’s pretty strict restrictions on Ultrabooks, AMD will give its partners free play with Trinity devices, allowing for prices to begin as low as US$599.

Final Thoughts

The E-Series APUs are a welcome addition, but they are really only an incremental update and apart from giving consumers more entry-level, more affordable options, they are not much to shout about. On the other hand, Trinity is where things really get interesting, what with AMD’s competing Ultrathin form factor and Intel pushing their Ultrabooks out with their recently released new low-voltage Ivy Bridge processors.

A showcase of Trinity notebooks from names such as Acer, HP and Toshiba.

That aside, AMD is also reemphasizing about its commitment to GPU acceleration, by stating that they have doubled the number of applications that can make use of AMD GPUs to accelerate processes, citing new examples like VLC and WinZip.

In summary, AMD is again banking on their graphics advantage in the mobile computing arena. The new Brazos 2.0 processors are not much to get excited over since they are only an incremental update, but with the upgraded graphics component, it could breathe much needed life into the rather uninteresting entry-level mobile segment. What's more exciting is what Trinity could mean for ultraportable notebooks and the entire notebooks industry as a whole.

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