Advanced Micro Devices said on Tuesday that it started to ship the first accelerated processing units (APUs) code-named Ontario and Zacate for revenue earlier today. The chips that combine low-power x86 cores as well as DirectX 11-class graphics processing engine will power thin-and-light notebooks, netbooks and nettops.

The announcement was made by AMD's senior vice president of products development Rick Bergman at AMD's annual financial analyst day. Mr. Bergman also demonstrated a laptop based on the company's Brazos platform that can employ either Ontario or Zacate.

The Ontario chips are designed for small form-factor netbooks and has thermal design power of just 9W, whereas Zacate products are aimed at notebooks nettops and have TDP of 18W. There will be four AMD APUs released initially:

• E350 - two low-power Bobcat cores operating at 1.60GHz, Radeon HD 6310 graphics engine with 80 stream processors and universal video decoder 3.0 engine operating at 500MHz, 18W TDP;
• E240 - one low-power Bobcat cores operating at 1.50GHz, Radeon HD 6310 graphics engine with 80 stream processors and universal video decoder 3.0 engine operating at 500MHz, 18W TDP;
• C50 - two low-power Bobcat cores operating at 1.0GHz, Radeon HD 6250 graphics engine with 80 stream processors and universal video decoder 3.0 engine operating at 280MHz, 9W TDP;
• C30 -one low-power Bobcat cores operating at 1.20GHz, Radeon HD 6250 graphics engine with 80 stream processors and universal video decoder 3.0 engine operating at 280MHz, 9W TDP;

AMD's Brazos platform for desktops and mobile computers will consist of AMD Fusion accelerated processing unit (APU) code-named Ontario/Zacate as well as 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, hence, Brazos platform will hardly be suitable for commercial desktops without additional chips.

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