AMD Benchmarks Zacate APU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 13, 2010 11:06 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Zacate
- Trade Shows
It's tradition for AMD to have an off-site meeting place during IDF week and this year is no exception. I headed over to AMD's suite to talk about servers, desktops and the imminent mobile Fusion launches. We've talked about AMD's three new microprocessors in great detail before. Bulldozer is targeted at the high end desktop and server markets, due out sometime in 2011 (sampling in Q4). Llano will arrive at the end of Q2 2011 and feature multiple 32nm Phenom II derived cores paired with a very beefy AMD DX11 GPU. What I'm most excited about however is the parts that will begin shipping in Q4 2010: Zacate for mainstream notebooks (18W TDP) and Ontario for netbooks (9W TDP).
Both APUs will have a pair of low-power Bobcat cores and an AMD DX11 GPU. AMD isn't publicly confirming how many cores the GPU side will have but both will share the same die manufactured on TSMC's 40nm process. The package is extremely compact:
The die area is very small. We've seen estimates as low as 74mm^2. On the flip side you'll see there aren't many balls on the package either:
The simple package is designed to make manufacturing as easy as possible. The relative lack of balls on the package seems to imply a single channel 64-bit DDR3 memory interface. Although AMD's 9W Ontario part clearly goes after Atom in the netbook space (and Bobcat's out-of-order architecture should ensure performance success), Zacate is going to go after the ~$500 mainstream notebook market. To prove its point AMD setup a Core i5 notebook and a Zacate test platform running City of Heroes at the same settings (1024 x 768, low quality):
The Core i5 notebook pictured above managed 14 - 19 fps while running around in the level. The Zacate platform did much better:
I saw performance in the 27 - 34 fps range on Zacate. At almost 2x the performance of Intel's HD Graphics, Zacate seems to provide the same performance boost that we saw with Sandy Bridge in our preview. Granted this isn't in a benchmark we've tried on Sandy Bridge, but the initial performance advantage is promising.
The Zacate test platform
For more GPU benchmarks check out our follow-up here.
AMD confirmed that we'll see hardware ready by the end of the year, with systems going on sale in early Q1. We may see mini-ITX boards at some point but initially the focus will be mainstream netbooks and notebooks priced at ~$500 all the way down to value netbook segments. AMD also promised 8+ hours of battery life on some of its designs, however that's a MobileMark figure - load use would be lower.
The performance is extremely promising. If we see this sort of graphics performance in a netbook, I think it may just reinvigorate the form factor.
In addition to Zacate we got brief updates on Bulldozer and AMD's upcoming Northern Islands GPU launch, the latter we'll be hearing about before the end of the year. That's all for now, expect to see more coverage from IDF later tonight.
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iwodo - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
I would like to know how this small tiny chip compare to Pentium M or Pentium 4 with Radeon X1600 or Geforce 4 Gfx.A Mini ITX Computer based on this + SSD would be great for 95% + of my needs.
mschira - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
it'll obliterate it while using much less power. The single core Atom is comparable with the pentium M, one Bobcat should be MUCH faster than Atom, this thing has two bobcats...Have you looked at the die shots? The GPU is HUGE! HUGE!.
What AMD has done here is not integrating a GPU into the CPU, but rather they integrated a CPU into a GPU....
M.
mino - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
That CPU into a GPU is a VERY nice point :)As for performance, think Radeon 9800 XT paired with Intel Core Duo 1.6GHz (Yonah).
bji - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
I did significant benchmarking on an Atom 330 (1.6 Ghz) versus the Pentium M 1.4 Ghz in my laptop. The Atom 330 had the benefit of more + faster memory and single-core performance was considerably worse than the Pentium M.I'd say single-core Atom @ 1.9 Ghz would be about equivalent to Pentium M @ 1.4 Ghz.
adonn78 - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
How well does it handle 1080P streaming video? Also that means about 5-6 hours under real world use.rootheday - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
I have a Lenovo T410 with Core I5 and Intel HD Graphics - very similar to the system AMD was using. On Amazon bookshelf, I get 40-50FPS and for Psychedlic Wheel, I get 1779 RPMI call BS on AMD on this one.
hybrid2d4x4 - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
You might be on to something here. I ran the same tests on my HTPC (E5200, GF9400 IGP, using Firefox 4b5) and got 27-41 FPS and 1335 RPM, respectively.It might make sense if the bookshelf demo was run on a i5 CULV, which runs the GFX at much lower clocks (which wouldn't be unfair since the vanilla i5s are 35W parts, whereas the CULVs are 18 or so- right in line with these new AMD parts), but there's no accounting for that 10x difference in Psychedellic unless they switched down to an ATOM for the intel representative.
Mautaznesh - Monday, September 27, 2010 - link
It was all explained in the last 2 articles about this. People reposting this whole AMD IS BSing stuff is getting old.They let Anandtech play with both machines and run their own tests.
They even ran Batman Arkham Asylum on both machines and Zacate still got 50% better performance. Intel i5 andits chip both had their drivers completely updated. Thats why it even got as good performance as it did.
And isn't the 35w just the CPU alone? or including the integrated gfx chip?
zacate doing 50% better on half the power? Thats down right amazing.
And you sandybridge idiots, Sandybridge is supposed to be using the same architecture as the i7 I hear and be integrated with an upgraded graphics card. can you imagine? After all this time they finally got a gfx card that'll compete with the motherboard already in my laptop year old HP.
M880+ATi 4200 = Crysis playable.
Accord99 - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
Yeah, with a Thinkpad W500 with a C2D manually set to 1.6GHz and a X4500, I still get ~1650 RPM with the same screen size.anactoraaron - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
Yeah I call BS here too. My sister has an i5 notebook that can run DA:O at normal res (768p) lowest settings and it gets 25-30fps. This has to be either an i5 ULV or the absolute worst game that the Intel graphics runs (thinking driver issue here...)