Intel doesnt make its CULV available for oem desktop top use. Dual core sandybridge should have a lower idle usage then current core i3's which are allready pretty good. This will probably be our best bet from intel, but shouldn't be as power friendly as zacate.

I reckon Intel doesn't care how their CULV chips get used. It's just few manufacturers use them for desktops. Viewsonic has a nettop based on Intel CULV+Intel GS45 and Zotac has some motherboards with Intel CULV+Nvidia ION 2.

Ontario and Zacate will support up to 7.1 DTS Master and Dolby True HD audio up to 24Mbps

Thanks. How about HDMI 1.4a? I guess it supports it too.

No, I think it is limited to HDMI 1.3.

These charts (attached) are very perplexing. Zacate is AMD Vision vanilla, hence it does not support "Smooth Blu-Ray with ATI Avivo HD Technology"? If this is true, it is not suitable for a HD HTPC.

Don't let the vision branding slide fool you. Zacate should not have any problem with Blu ray playback. It has a UVD 3 block for h/w acceleration.

It is a very solid performer and should be a great part for HTPC. Keep in mind, the graphics core on the APU is equivalent to a discrete level card. I have seen this thing in action and it is pretty impressive when you think about it and it is only 18W.

the single channel 64 bit memory controller worries me. That's not a lot of bandwidth for 2 cores and a gpu.

Hi Java,

This all sounds very promising. Have you seen how the platform performs with interlaced content? 1080i stuff and SD material?

Also interested in how well it does 2:2 pulldown for PAL DVD's.

Thanks,

Wo0zy

Edit Whoa. More posts while I was posting. Will start reading. Sorry if my questions have already been answered.

So street date is January? I'm looking to build an HTPC just for 1080i Mpeg2 and bluray and this frankly looks perfect if it does 23hz properly and requires (hopefully) only a big passive heatsink...

You mean both decoding and bitstreaming?

May I ask will Zacate have a standardized socket for heatsink?

Aparently it has 160 Stream units (2x80) compared to 5450's 80 Stream units. And with UVD 3.0 atleast the numbers looks promissing.

It seems like they are underselling it.

The socket (FT1) is BGA, CPU is soldered to the mb. Perhaps there is no standardized way to attach a heatsink (i.e. each manufacturer decides what cooling solution to use).

Based on what reasoning?

- AnandTech (and every other preview published on November 9th) says:


- Cedar (HD 5450) and Zacate (E350) are manufactured in TSMC 40 nm process. Die size and transistor count:

- Cedar: 59 mm^2, 292M
- Zacate: 75 mm^2, 380M

so Zacate die can't have 2 x Cedar.

- Gaming performance of Zacate is no better than Cedar.

Aren't they enough?

Someone said so, not sure if they were allowed to leak that info so I don't think I want to take the chance on getting them into trouble, and I might have heard wrong, but I think that is what he said.

Who said so (if you remember)? Just for curiosity.

Googling with key words "Zacate" and "160sp" or "Zacate" and "160 stream", I see many results, all of which are merely guesses, not even leaked information. For example, PC Perspective:

OK, I found interesting sentences in the PC Perspective preview (also published on November 9th):

Update: The author corrected the mistake.



Words in red letters are my comments. The trick is

1 SIMD in HD 5900/5800/5700/5600/5500 Series GPU = 16 Thread Processors = 80 Stream Cores
1 SIMD in HD 5450 GPU = 8 Thread Processors = 40 Stream Cores (the number of Thread Processors in the SIMD engine is reduced in half) Perhaps the author confused them. Here are figures of SIMD (the black rectangle) and Thread Processor (the white rectangle; each consisting of 5 Stream Cores, called VLIW5 [Very Long Instruction Word 5]) in HD 5570 and HD 5450.

HD 5570 (5 x SIMD, 80 Thread Processors, 400 Stream Processors):

HD 5450 (2 x SIMD, 16 Thread Processors, 80 Stream Processors):

BTW it is a bit surprising that some hardware review sites (like PC Perspective; the author is Ryan Shrout) said HD 5450 has *one* SIMD unit with 80 stream processors. This is wrong. HD 5450 has *two* SIMD units, each with 40 stream processors, 80 stream processors in total.

Ok, since he it's in their article aswell I guess it's no harm to say that PC Perspectives podcast is where I heard 2x80 aswell, but I guess they were wrong then.

This is not really designed for full fledged gaming. Its more directed at us HTPC guys for desktop versions, and for the ultra thin/light netbook/laptop market. Gamers are still going to want some serious hardware, but zacate would probably also work well for people that just surf the internet and do documents for work and what not. High end PC power seems to be moving past what the casual user will need, especially since netbooks have forced MS to make windows less of a resource hog.

Is there any news on whether it will be available on micro atx boards? I like having the extra pci slots. I really don't need the compactness of an itx board, I just want low power.

I didn't know you could buy mobo's for that. I think the atom/ion 2 boards idle at about the same watts as a core i3, so it doesn't seem that appealing to me. CULV sandybridge, now that will be something.

Perhaps zero possibility. Zacate in microATX is like Atom in microATX (no such a mb). The southbridge "Hudson"-M1 FCH has only 4 PCIe lanes (one of them will be used for Gb LAN and one likely used for USB3) and zero PCI. It can't supply as many as 4 slots (with one exception: 1 x PCIe x4 [from Zacate], and 3 x PCIe x1). Moreover it is unlikely that a mb manufacturer adds a PCIe-to-PCI bridge in such a low-cost platform.

The author of the PC Perspective article got the definitive answer from AMD: Zacate has 2 x 40 sp = 80 sp, just like HD 5450. The article was corrected.

And something else is added aswell. It does support bitstreaming. So even though the first ones might be a bit too weak for the best post processing, I'm guessing the next revision will to great. And who knows, maybe the UVD 3.0 and the new drivers that were rumored a couple of weeks back makes the first generation powerfull enough aswell.

Memory bandwidth is the last thing modern architectures need to worry about when you're talking about the types of tasks Zacate is designed for. Hell, it's not like dual channel even makes that much difference for the average desktop system.

AMD's VP tells Llano comes in H1 2011, unlike the previous rumor, Llano in H2 2011.

Of course Liano (based on K10) is just a temporary solution. Triniy Fusion APU based on Bulldozer is the one we (or I) want.

Would Liano still base on AM3 socket? How about bulldozer?
I heard that sandy bridge still has the 24p bug...

Llano = K10 CPU + HD 5xxx GPU will have a new socket, called Socket FM1 for desktop, Socket FS1 for the high-end mobile and Socket FP1 for the mainstream mobile (according to a rumor). Zambezi (Bulldozer) has Socket AM3+, more details.


Interesting. Where did you hear it?

Is there a specific reason for this or is it because it's based on "old" technology? Kinda dissapointing if it only supports 1.3 when the Radeon HD supports 1.4a