New AMD E-Series APUs Set the High Bar for Essential Notebook Battery Life

[btarunr]

AMD today announced the launch of its latest AMD E-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) platform. Designed for essential notebook and desktop personal computers which meet basic performance needs at accessible price points, the 2012 AMD E-Series APU enables long battery life and a best-in-class entertainment and media experience, while striking a balance between energy efficiency and unique innovations for brilliant high definition (HD) entertainment.

"In 2011, we showed the industry you could get discrete-level GPU power in a notebook without added power consumption or cost, resulting in the most successful notebook platform in AMD's history," said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Client Business Unit. "Today we raise the bar even higher with our latest APU offering. Our 2012 AMD E-Series APU gives consumers a visually superior choice for everyday performance with the latest graphics technology and nearly three hours more battery life than the competition."

Formerly codenamed "Brazos 2.0," the 2012 AMD E-Series APU is the feature-rich update to the most successful AMD notebook processor platform ever. Unique benefits of the new platform include:

• Improved mobility with up to 36 percent longer battery life compared to the competition2 . Systems based on the 2012 AMD E-Series APU can deliver up to 11 hours of resting battery life and up to a 90 minute competitive advantage in Web browsing and online flash gaming3;
• Enhanced video experience with technology to help remove shakes and jitters from online or other video files through AMD Steady Video technology, which has plug-in support for all major Web browsers along with Windows Media Player and the open source VLC player;
• Leading-edge gaming experience. The 2012 AMD E-Series APU platform is the only essential notebook platform that offers built-in AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics with DirectX 11 and DirectCompute for a more feature-rich experience on the latest games;
• Superior online experience with AMD Quick Stream technology which prioritizes Internet bandwidth towards video stream buffering or online gaming for a smoother, virtually uninterrupted browsing experience5;
• 10x faster data transfer speeds (5Gbps) with external hard drives and cameras thanks to two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports;
• Increased performance through Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) frequency boosts;
• The capability to project to external 3D displays for the latest 3D video and gaming.

Accelerated Experience
Thanks to the compute capabilities in AMD Radeon HD graphics, major Web browsers such as Internet Explorer 9, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome offer an accelerated Web experience on the new AMD E-Series APUs. AMD has collaborated with Microsoft to optimize the new AMD E-Series APUs for key features in Microsoft Windows 8 to help improve the overall experience. Optimizations for HTML5 and full support for the new Metro user interface will help accelerate new Metro-based apps developed for Microsoft's newest operating system.

Availability and Technical Details
AMD expects global OEMs such as Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba to offer AMD E-Series APU-based systems.


View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[btarunr]

 

[Yo_Wattup]

Epiiiiiic

 

[RejZoR]

APU's are currently AMD's thing so they have to get the best they can from them. It just makes me wonder why is Intel still insisting on shitty GMA950 derivates instead of attaching Intel HD3000 GPU or better to the Atom's. That would make a whole lot more sense... but until then, AMD APU's are the obvious choice... I love my E-450 notebook, it's a great balance of CPU and GPU performance for relatively low price.

 

[de.das.dude]

I look at the APU series and see sensibility everywhere.


@xfire, seeing you aftre a long time. what happened to your FB?

 

[HumanSmoke]

"Windows 8 Optimized"

Now that's what I call a bullet point

[/sarcasm]

 

[Xyvik]

This is good news, actually. I recommend and have used various forms of AMD APUs in laptops and for family members who don't need a whole lot from their rigs. In short, I've used them a lot and these new ones look awesome.

AMD needs something besides GPUs to keep them afloat, and these look like they will help.

 

[Melvis]

SWEET! Going to head over to Lenovo and see if they will make a new X120e with this APU, so want one!!

 

[Mussels]

my older generation APU laptop is sweet, AMD has a winner with this. 11 hours battery is pretty epic for a 'gaming' capable system.

 

[Thefumigator]

APU's are currently AMD's thing so they have to get the best they can from them. It just makes me wonder why is Intel still insisting on shitty GMA950 derivates instead of attaching Intel HD3000 GPU or better to the Atom's. That would make a whole lot more sense... but until then, AMD APU's are the obvious choice... I love my E-450 notebook, it's a great balance of CPU and GPU performance for relatively low price.

Intel's HD 3000 GPU has a higher power consumption, and would set the atom price higher. Which in terms of strategy would make the atom a disaster because, still with the HD3000, the atom would fail against these E-series APUs. So they should keep the atom cpu paired with the lowest GPU, and keep it cheap and low in power consumption...

 

[Hotobu]

So what companies will allow me to customize a model with an AMD APU?

 

[Jstn7477]

I can understand these for netbooks, but to be honestly a few desktop manufacurers are charging a few hundred bucks for a full size mATX tower and a Brazos APU (that's comparable to a single core K8 processor and can't even keep up with its graphics component in many cases, one instance being HL2: Lost Coast which I tried on my E350 and it had decent frame rates but stuttered almost constantly). They are generally anemic for anything more than netbooks and basic tasks, with CPU usage frequently spiking to 100% during web browsing in some cases.

If they instead were able to put a single Llano core or Piledriver module in one of these while maintaining close to the same TDP and the same graphics component, these chips would be so much better. Having crappy graphics sucks, but having a crappy CPU is even worse.