AnandTech has posted a couple of articles on AMD’s Zacate. What is a Zacate? Well, the Zacate is AMD’s APU. APU does not stand for axillary power unit. Instead it stands for accelerated processing unit. It is a combination of an AMD CPU and a Direct X11 GPU. It consumes just 18 Watts, and is aimed at the notebook market. The problem with Zacate is that the performance in one test was a bit too high. Was AMD cheating? No, not at all. It turns out that the test was valid, but you need to read the article to find out why the performance of Zacate was so good.
The first demo we saw on Monday was the system running City of Heroes. In CoH Zacate managed to reach frame rates around 2x of what we saw on the Core i5-M 520. AMD also ran through a number of IE9 performance tests including the Psychadelic HTML5 benchmark and the Amazon Shelf test. In both of those tests, the Zacate platform was significantly faster than the Core i5-M 520. And it was those IE9 tests that seemed suspect.
I didn’t think much of it at first, but Zacate managed a ~10x performance advantage in the IE9 Psychadelic benchmark. While Zacate should have a higher performance GPU, it shouldn’t be that much faster. Something was amiss.
via AMD’s Zacate APU Performance Update – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News
