On the second day of Asia's leading IT fair Computex 2012, AMD announced the launch of its latest AMD E-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) platform, the E1-1200 and E2-1800.
The successors to last year's Brazos chips, E1-1200 and E2-1800 are 1.4GHz and 1.7GHz dual-core APUs manufactured with the same 45nm die process as the old Brazos APUs, but despite the increased clock speed use no more power than their predecessors.
The pair is rated at 18W TDP for power consumption, which is competitive with Intel's 17W TDP ultra low-voltage (ULV) processors. Sitting beneath the more powerful Trinity chips in the company's 2012 range, the Brazos 2.0 chips feature DirectX 11-compatible Radeon HD 7300M series GPUs which can be used to accelerate certain applications.
The E-Series APUs will appear in $599 affordable ultra-thin laptops and will be optimized for HTML5 (and therefore Windows 8 Metro apps). AMD claims the new chips will be good for up to 11 hours of usage and says they will last up to 90 minutes longer than comparable Intel chips when web browsing or using flash. You can expect to find the Brazos 2.0 APUs in products from Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba later this year.
Formerly codenamed "Brazos 2.0," the 2012 AMD E-Series APU is the feature-rich update with the following specs under the hood.
- Improved mobility with up to 36 percent longer battery life compared to the competition. Systems based on the 2012 AMD E-Series APU can deliver up to 11 hours of resting battery life and up to a 90 minute competitive advantage in Web browsing and online flash gaming;
- Enhanced video experience with technology to help remove shakes and jitters from online or other video files through AMD Steady Video technology, which has plug-in support for all major Web browsers along with Windows Media Player and the open source VLC player.
- Leading-edge gaming experience. The 2012 AMD E-Series APU platform is the only essential notebook platform that offers built-in AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics with DirectX 11 and DirectCompute for a more feature-rich experience on the latest games.
- Superior online experience with AMD Quick Stream technology which prioritizes Internet bandwidth towards video stream buffering or online gaming for a smoother, virtually uninterrupted browsing experience.
- 10x faster data transfer speeds (5Gbps) with external hard drives and cameras thanks to two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports.
- Increased performance through Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) frequency boosts.
- The capability to project to external 3D displays for the latest 3D video and gaming.
Source: AMD
