MSFN Forum: Price of AMD Fusion-Based Computers to Start at $349.

Systems powered by AMD’s code-named Ontario and Zacate accelerated processing units (APUs) will cost starting from $349. The world’s second largest supplier of microprocessors for personal computers hopes to revolutionize the markets of low-cost netbooks and notebooks with its new chips thanks to high amount of advantages that they bring.

“We believe we should see notebooks [based on Ontario and Zacate] in around the $349 range,” said Godfrey Cheng, a director of client technology unit at AMD, in an interview with X-bit labs.

The Ontario and Zacate accelerated processing units belong to the Brazos platform that brings a number of features that so far have not been available at low price-points. According to AMD, the Brazos platform offers a significant amount of advantages compared to Intel Atom, the chip that powers the fast majority of notebooks. Among the most important advantages of Brazos AMD names better micro-architecture, DirectX 11 graphics engine as well as support for general-purpose computing on graphics processing unit.

“Brazos has excellently balanced performance on x86, graphics and parallel compute. If you look at typical Atom platform today, it basically has out-of-date in-order x86 core [as well as low-end graphics adapter]. We have out-of-order x86 core. We have DirectX 11 graphics engine with UVD 3.0 video decoder. We have GPGPU with DirectCompute and OpenCL support. Our 9W/18W solution provide performance and feature-set comparable to competitor's 35W solutions,” said Mr. Cheng.

Full story: xbitlabs