Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"I'll admit it. We are about to commit a terrible crime against the holy writ of product segmentation. We're about to consider the merits of AMD's Brazos and Intel's Pine Trail—incredibly small, low-power, and inexpensive PC platforms—versus a whole range of full-grown desktop CPUs, a ridiculously unfair and inappropriate endeavor if ever there was one."

The results that Tech Report posts should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. It should be obvious to almost anyone that the AMD E-350 will not be able to really compete against the likes of the latest generation desktop processors; it was never designed to. It does show that AMD finally has something with which to compete against Intel with its Atom CPU. Paired with a stronger GPU, it also means that Intel has some challenges in front of it, and its relationship with NVidia has become much more important. Sure, Intel might think that higher powered GPU is overkill right now, but it definitely seems to becoming an increasingly important part of computing. Especially with GPGPU acceleration becoming much more commonplace.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's true in sports, just as it is in technology. An accelerated processing unit (APU) is more than just a CPU + GPU. Much more. And, AMD Fusion is more than just a technology product supported by software and hardware vendors. AMD Fusion is about an entire ecosystem changing the computing landscape as we know it."

I've been hearing about AMD's combination CPU/GPU since mid 2008 and it's finally becoming a reality - well, sometime in 2011 at least. The performance looks impressive, so as long as the power consumption and heat are held in check, this could be an impressive piece of hardware.