It’s the factual state of affairs that integration is our imminent future, reinforced every day through announcements and presentation of various new technologies. The lack of upgrade options is something that we seem to be willing to renounce in order to get complete and efficient solutions. Intel’s latest CPU series has reduced overclocking to a lower level, thus announcing the direction that new products and technologies are about to take. Consequently, the hotly anticipated AMD Fusion, the first in the line of entirely integrated solutions, has finally reached us, in the form of ASUS E35 M1-M PRO model, carrying the currently strongest Zacate APU.

AMD E-350 is a codename concealing the Brazos APU product line, present alongside the aforementioned AMD Zacate and an even more power-efficient Ontario APU. Zacate APU consumes 18 W of power; there are versions with a single Bobcat core and those with two of them. Our test sample was equipped with the strongest available desktop version of E-350, which consists of two low-consumption Bobcat cores, combined with Radeon 6310 integrated graphics. Besides this version, Zacate can also be found as a single-core variant, named E-240 and running at 100 MHz lower than our own. The Ontario APU also has single-core and dual-core versions - C50 and C30, both containing the Radeon 6250 graphics. Ontario models’ TDP is only half of Zacate’s, peaking at 9 W, but CPU and GPU both work at significantly lower frequencies; expectedly, since Ontario’s primary target market is mobile solutions.

In order to make things clear, AMD has continued with their nomenclature system, separating Fusion platforms immediately via the first letter in the product name: “A” for Llano, “E” for Zacate and “C” for Ontario (although we totally wouldn’t mind it being “L”, “Z” and “O”, to be honest).

As you may have already deduced, the APU contains both the CPU and the GPU within one chip, together with a Hudson controller hub (formerly southbridge) in charge of peripheral connections (USB, SATA6, PCI-E, HD Audio…). The memory controller is situated inside the APU, together with VGA outputs, and the same goes for the improved branch predictor and Bobcat cores, with 32 KB L2 and 512 KB L2 cache. Unsurprisingly, the manufacturing is done in 40 nm, and the APU’s total surface is a mere 75 mm², which seems particularly small compared to Deneb and Thuban cores, which take up 258 and 346 mm², respectively.

The integrated graphics core supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0 and video acceleration via UVD 3.0, as it’s based on an improved Radeon 5450 (Cedar GPU). The biggest advancements have been made in video acceleration, i.e. UVD units, which are supposed to take up most of the load induced by multimedia content playback.

The strongest version of the desktop Brazos platform has two Bobcat cores working at 1.6 GHz, while the Loveland GPU (Radeon 6310) has 80 stream processors, eight texture units and four ROPs at disposal. Only a single-channel memory configuration is supported, and the chipset allows speeds of up to 1066 MHz DDR3. Besides the two Bobcat cores and the memory controller, most of the APU is taken up by the graphics core, with its SIMD engines and the new UVD, while one section is also reserved for platform interfaces. This way, the APU is able to provide two digital display interfaces and 5x8 PCI-E lines. Hudson is manufactured in 65 nm, communicating with the APU via UMI (Unified Media Interface), with two hub versions available: A50M and A45. The A50M hub offers first-generation UMI and SATA6, while A45 has second-generation UMI, SATA3 and PCI support. Fourteen USB ports, four PCI-E 2.0 lines and system monitoring chips are all there as well.