Advanced Micro Devices this week said that four large manufacturers of mainboards plan to offer their platforms based on the company's E-series and C-series accelerated processing units (APUs). There will also be smaller manufacturers, who will also offer similar devices. The choice of motherboards will ensure relatively wide adoption of AMD's APUs on the desktop market.

“AMD is ushering in a new era of personal computing, and our industry partners are ready to take advantage of the first ever AMD Fusion APU. By combining the processing of the CPU with the GPU on a single energy efficient chip, we believe their customers can take advantage of better price/performance, superior 1080p HD playback and small form factors for innovative designs," said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager of computing solutions group of client division at AMD.

Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology, MicroStar International and Sapphire Technologies are committed to offer mainboards based on AMD Brazos platform with integrated C-series (Ontario, 9W) or E-series (Zacate, 18W) accelerated processing units code-named Ontario and Zacate, respectively.

As reported previously, AMD has been working with half a dozen of motherboard makers on desktop APU-based platforms in mini-ITX form-factor. As it appears, MSI decided to make its mainboard based on AMD's first Fusion APU in micro-ATX form-factor, Gigabyte plans to release a mini-ITX motherboard, form-factors of platforms from Asus and Sapphire are unknown. Previously it was also reported that Gigabyte intends to add overclocking capabilities to its Brazos-based mainboard.

Prices onto desktop platforms featuring AMD APU and supporting input/output controllers are unknown. But based on the fact that entry-level netbooks/notebooks powered by AMD's first APUs are projected to cost from $349, pure desktop mainboards should be priced at a significantly lower price.

AMD Brazos platform for desktops and mobile computers will consist of an AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) code-named Ontario/Zacate (featuring one or two x86 cores based on Bobcat micro-architecture as well as a DirectX 11 and OpenCL/OpenGL-compliant graphics engine) in addition to code-named Hudson D1 fusion controller hub, which will connect to processor using PCI Express 2.0 x4 bus and will support 4 PCIe x1 ports, PCI bus, 6 Serial ATA-300 ports, 14 USB 2.0 ports as well as integrated clock-generator. The part does not support RAID, Gigabit Ethernet and other capabilities.

Tags: AMD, Ontario, zacate, Fusion, Brazos, 40nm