The Future is Fusion! Fusion review here

i plan on buying the zacate and using it as an htpc to replace my WDTV live plus. while the WDTV is nice i like the fact that the fusion boards will have 4 or 5 sata ports for hard drives. something the WDTV doesnt have.
 
Awesome, I was waiting for the low power one to be reviewed to see how it scaled down. CPU speed isn't that great @ 1GHz/8W, but it looks close enough to the N550 for the difference not to matter much.

There's no competition for the GPU of course. The GMA 3150 has abysmal gaming performance. Ontario's GPU performance isn't anything to cheer about, but it's a lot better than Atom. I mean performance similar to the HD 3200 IGP was slow 2 years ago too. :p

It would be hard to recommend a N550 over a C-50.
 
So your saying the future is little netbooks? Most of them aren't much bigger than a graphing calculator. I don't think I would ever game on one or enjoy a movie on one.
Pass.
 
Yeah netbooks are on the decline, and according to Dirk Meyer last week, AMD is going to sit out tablets "for the foreseeable future" since AMD doesn't have a suitable processor. Still, if you want a lower cost netbook and horrible graphics performance was holding you back (and Ion2 is out of your price range), at least there's another option.

No one said this was perfect timing to finally enter the market. At this point, AMD just releasing new products is cause for kudos. ;)
 
I would really like it for a homeserver/nas and basic computer tasks. big things for me though are going to be linux support and cost. If i can buy a 200$ netbook with one of these, I would definitely buy them for my nieces and nephews to use for school
 
griff30 said:
So your saying the future is little netbooks? Most of them aren't much bigger than a graphing calculator. I don't think I would ever game on one or enjoy a movie on one.
Pass.
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for the consumer market thats perfectly fine for them. for us thats why we have Gigabyte, Sapphire, and Asus to make m-ITX boards to support the zacate and Llano. i mean think about it. you could build your self a bad ass HTPC with 8TB's of storage and just toss it in your entertainment center and never have to think twice about it. you will never have to deal with excessive heat or noise. its the perfect replacement for something like the WDTV. hell you can even throw a tv tuner card in the pci-e x16 slot. it honestly doesnt get much better then that for a low power system.

bobcat was never ment for hard core gaming. lets put it in a different light. say your flying some where on a 7 hour flight and you want to play some games while your flying. are you going to bring a hard core gaming laptop? or are you going to bring something in a smaller format, say a 13" laptop that has the performance to at least play some games without having to recharge it during that 7 hour flight?

for what it is the bobcat fills the catigory of main stream mobile consumers with the ability to do HD acceleration in a small form factor. heck if they throw an HDMI out on some of those notebooks/netbooks they would be perfect for the business community as well since you could directly connect it to a projector or tv. right now intel doesnt offer any of that except with the larger laptops using the 4500HD chipset that has HDMI out. not saying that AMD will for sure but it would be a damn nice idea if they did.

moon02 said:
I would really like it for a homeserver/nas and basic computer tasks. big things for me though are going to be linux support and cost. If i can buy a 200$ netbook with one of these, I would definitely buy them for my nieces and nephews to use for school
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linux support shouldn't be an issue since its an x86 processor and if AMD stays true to their normal hardware it probably will even support virtualization. also [H] is coming out with an extensive review on AMD/ATI linux drivers so that might shine some light on what to expect with the bobcat processors but you are right something like this would be perfect for a NAS. i doubt they will be priced in the 200 range(at least i hope not). most of the reports coming out of CES are reporting that AMD is going to price them very competitively with the Atom. so i'm figuring more in the low 100's for the high end zacates and under 100 for the low end chips.
 
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You won't find a netbook under $500 new this year especially with an AMD APU.too little too late and way too much$.
 
I was thinking ~200 for specifically netbooks. I have looked at the atom systems but I know my nephews and nieces. While they wont play top end games or do things as demanding as a hardcore user, the anemic graphics is just not up to the task. I am really looking forward to seeing amd netbooks.

For a nas/home server setup I am hoping we have better motherboard options then atom. While I think their performance is fine for this task, the lackluster motherboard offerings leave much to be desired. I am hoping the amd options are not as limited. I want low wattage and lots of sata ports.
 
this is proof that even if AMD doesn't deliver with BD, we can still expect them to be the most competitve in mobile solutions.
 
Yeah, AMD took a lions share in mobile dedicated graphics last year.... while it's likely 90% HD5470 or something, it's still a start :p
 
Aaron11 said:
this is proof that even if AMD doesn't deliver with BD, we can still expect them to be the most competitve in mobile solutions.
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It really depends how much the customer desires faster 3D performance. When scaled down to 8W, the 1GHz Ontario C-50 is slightly slower than the N550 in CPU performance, which is its competition.

I would recommend the C-50 over the N550, but tbh a lot of people just don't care about IGP performance. The same situation happened when Intel still had unreasonably slow, nearly featureless mobile IGPs and AMD had merely slow, but feature rich IGP options. ;) It just didn't matter to the vast majority of buyers.

IMO the biggest benefit the C-50 has isn't the GPU performance, but lack of dumb restrictions Intel puts on mobile Atom chip sales. Want a 14", or even a 15.6" 1366x768 C-50 notebook? AMD doesn't care. I expect Intel to lift some of those restrictions now that there is competition. (I know MS also has restrictions on the dirt cheap copies of XP, discontinued, and Windows 7 Starter. Intel has additional restrictions.)
 
moon02 said:
I was thinking ~200 for specifically netbooks. I have looked at the atom systems but I know my nephews and nieces. While they wont play top end games or do things as demanding as a hardcore user, the anemic graphics is just not up to the task. I am really looking forward to seeing amd netbooks.

For a nas/home server setup I am hoping we have better motherboard options then atom. While I think their performance is fine for this task, the lackluster motherboard offerings leave much to be desired. I am hoping the amd options are not as limited. I want low wattage and lots of sata ports.
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when they first come out i'm guessing they will be in the mid 300's and then slowly drop.

as far as boards check out the AMD motherboard section theres a thread in there talking about the sapphire board that was at CES with some information about the gigabyte board thats also coming out.. lets just say USB 3.0 and 5 sata ports with a pci-e x16 slot at x4.. perfect for a NAS.

pxc said:
It really depends how much the customer desires faster 3D performance. When scaled down to 8W, the 1GHz Ontario C-50 is slightly slower than the N550 in CPU performance, which is its competition.

I would recommend the C-50 over the N550, but tbh a lot of people just don't care about IGP performance. The same situation happened when Intel still had unreasonably slow, nearly featureless mobile IGPs and AMD had merely slow, but feature rich IGP options. ;) It just didn't matter to the vast majority of buyers.

IMO the biggest benefit the C-50 has isn't the GPU performance, but lack of dumb restrictions Intel puts on mobile Atom chip sales. Want a 14", or even a 15.6" 1366x768 C-50 notebook? AMD doesn't care. I expect Intel to lift some of those restrictions now that there is competition. (I know MS also has restrictions on the dirt cheap copies of XP, discontinued, and Windows 7 Starter. Intel has additional restrictions.)
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its not that a lot of people dont care about IGP support, a lot of it is people dont realize how much flash relies on IGP performance. when people see the performance difference between flash on say a bobcat vs an atom i think it will be a much bigger selling point. especially for all those facebook kids/parents that sit there playing farmville and crap 24/7.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
its not that a lot of people dont care about IGP support, a lot of it is people dont realize how much flash relies on IGP performance.
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The N550 plays back Flash video smoothly, at least what people would play on the LCD such as 720p Flash video. To most buyers who use the LCD, there is no difference in Flash video performance between the N550 and C-50. Both will play those 720p clips smoothly. I think there's a tendency to think of Atom as worse than it is, or possibly even worthless for common tasks. It's not.

It's one of those abstract things when you say Ontario can play back 1080p. That's something interesting, but in practice few people will care. If it's an important feature to the buyer, of course the choice is clear. It won't really shift sales much based on that. Not everyone is a geek. :p
 
pxc said:
It really depends how much the customer desires faster 3D performance. When scaled down to 8W, the 1GHz Ontario C-50 is slightly slower than the N550 in CPU performance, which is its competition.

I would recommend the C-50 over the N550, but tbh a lot of people just don't care about IGP performance. The same situation happened when Intel still had unreasonably slow, nearly featureless mobile IGPs and AMD had merely slow, but feature rich IGP options. ;) It just didn't matter to the vast majority of buyers.

IMO the biggest benefit the C-50 has isn't the GPU performance, but lack of dumb restrictions Intel puts on mobile Atom chip sales. Want a 14", or even a 15.6" 1366x768 C-50 notebook? AMD doesn't care. I expect Intel to lift some of those restrictions now that there is competition. (I know MS also has restrictions on the dirt cheap copies of XP, discontinued, and Windows 7 Starter. Intel has additional restrictions.)
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iirc, Intel and MS collabed on the Win7/XP lic pricing requirements. Stupid pricks. At least nVidia had the balls to simply INF disable the original ION to meet requirements :p
 
sirmo said:
Have you seen the prices on those chips? They can't even touch the netbook market as the chips alone cost as much as a netbook.
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Yeah, I suppose if cost is your limiting factor. I personally prefer to pay more for a ULV processor in a large netbook style body
 
pxc said:
The N550 plays back Flash video smoothly, at least what people would play on the LCD such as 720p Flash video. To most buyers who use the LCD, there is no difference in Flash video performance between the N550 and C-50. Both will play those 720p clips smoothly. I think there's a tendency to think of Atom as worse than it is, or possibly even worthless for common tasks. It's not.

It's one of those abstract things when you say Ontario can play back 1080p. That's something interesting, but in practice few people will care. If it's an important feature to the buyer, of course the choice is clear. It won't really shift sales much based on that. Not everyone is a geek. :p
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i have no clue what atom processor is in my sisters eepc(some dual core atom processor) but god that thing is horrible when it came to anything flash related.
 
I would like one with a 1.8 inch ssd and 2 gigs of memory mounted in a nice small box on the back of the tv in the kitchen. Perfect for media center, netflix, hulu, and looking up recipes. Nice, small, unobtrusive, and low power. It's perfect.
 
Was the n550 using a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, because all the atoms I have toyed around with are horrid in flash.

I do think however you under estimate the growing importance of graphics acceleration. Flash really is just the beginning not the end of its importance. Internet explorer 9 is going to use it for html 5. As everything moves more and more to the cloud and utilizes more complex web interfaces, what use is a netbook that can't run a web app with decent performance? 1080p and 720p maybe just lingo to most people, but dog performance when they use complex web apps based on flash and html5 won't cut it.

I personally think intel and microsoft have hamstrung the netbook market because it has great potential to eat their margins. This is why I am so eager to see fusion and arm processors start tackling this market. They have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by its success. We as consumers will surely benefit.
 
moon02 said:
Was the n550 using a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, because all the atoms I have toyed around with are horrid in flash.
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Nope. The GMA 3150 doesn't support x264/H.264 decoding so it's done on the CPU. CPU utilization was 35%-45% in 2 different reviews while playing back a few different 720p flash videos. The N550 is dual core with HT. CPU utilization is much lower with the Broadcom Crystal HD chip.

My two Atom netbooks (Mini 9 w/1.6GHz and Mini 10v w/1.66GHz) were OK with flash video in general, but would struggle on certain youtube 720p videos and other high bitrate videos (my own 2Mbps x264 rips, for example) using the default codecs that come with Windows 7 or Flash. The bitrate of course affects CPU utilization with software decoding. So it's definitely YMMV. But the idea that Atom struggled with default quality flash video on youtube for example is just fantasy. I think I covered the reasons for that above. ;)
 
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