AMD's Zacate E-350 Fusion Processor Benchmarked, Beats Intel Atom/NVIDIA Ion 2 | Hacker News Reader

AMD's Zacate E-350 Fusion Processor Benchmarked, Beats Intel Atom/NVIDIA Ion 2

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31 pointsMojoKid9 comments

This is a really good thing. Intel has had it way too easy with Atom for a long time, and it's been obvious they have deliberately kept the performance low enough to avoid competition with their higher priced lines.

With ARM pushing Atom up from below, and AMD filling in the hole above it Intel will have to start competing harder at the low end, and a motivated Intel is always good for the industry.

Anandtech has published their benchmarking as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-pr...

So did Tech Report: http://techreport.com/articles.x/19981

Every time I see one of these articles come up on Hacker News I always think "Oh, I bet Anandtech's article must be out." And I go there instead of reading the one linked here.

I would love to see a hearkening back to those glory days of AMD product towering over Intel's Netburst, even if it's not in the "performance" segment of processors. This type of competition has only brought good things.

AMD seems to have done the right thing here. They aimed for the weak point between CULV and Atom and actually hit it, plus they added some pretty good graphics too with a small number of chips overall.

The rumor on the street is that Apple is eyeballing these chips for next gen Macbooks.

Surely not these but the next batch of Fusion chips with "grown-up" CPU parts (Phenom/Athlon). Even the 11" Macbook Air's 1.4GHz Core2Duo ULV blows all of these chips out of the water.

True, maybe not Macbooks with Zacate, unless Apple wants something cheaper and lighter. And these parts aren't that far off from CULV Core 2 chips actually.

I think their version of cheaper and lighter will be the next step up from the A4, i.e. something ARM-based for their iOS devices. By avoiding the Core iX chips in the 11"/13" devices in favour of a faster GPU they've already demonstrated they're not keen to sacrifice computing power below a certain level.

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