AMD To Launch Attack On ION & Atom In 2011

AMD has released more details on its calculated response to the growing threat of Intel's Atom range as it released an updated notebook platform roadmap in Singapore.

OCworkbench says that next year, the Brazos platform, which is made up of the Ontario APU (two Bobcat cores, DirectX11 GPU and support for DDR3) and comes as a BGA package, will be AMD's prime candidate to face more powerful Atom products.

AMD has also yet to confirm whether Brazos will be manufactured using 32nm process although that would make sense both financially and technically.

By next year though, Nvidia will have probably already released the third iteration of the ION and Intel will have increased the performance of its onboard graphics modules.

We suggested two weeks ago that the DirectX11 GPU used could have as little as 160 stream processors and still be more powerful than any current non-AMD integrated GPU.

AMD previously said that Ontario will offer "90 percent of today's mainstream performance" in less than half the die area (which we presume also includes the GPU) which was great at the end of 2009 but might not be enough 18 months down the line.

Not much is known about Bobcat other than it is a very low power design, supports SSE1-3 as well as virtualisation and will be geared at sub-20W products and devices.