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Asus will build an AMD Fusion mini-ITX mainboard
IT LOOKS LIKE Asus is designing a mini-ITX mainboard for AMD's first low-power Fusion chip code-named Ontario.
Details about the motherboard are hard to find. It would appear that Asus wants to put it under the bonnet of home entertainment systems that it has planned, but it could equally end up as part of an EeePC or similar setup.
Word on the street is that AMD's Ontario chip will have the same power as an Athlon II X2 250U, but with a DirectX 11 graphics chip built in and running on only 18W.
If it can do this then it looks like Ontario will be a viable rival to Atom in the mini-ITX market.
Asus is keeping details of performance or the board's eventual use close to its chest, although Bit-Tech even applied a Chinese burn to the press officer.
All Asus will say is that it is still early days for its mainboard design. µ
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The Atom may be fine running a file server or a netbook, but they are piss poor at HD video playback.
Even the newest dual core Atom + nVidia ION netbooks struggle at HD video playback.
If Ontario has the CPU performance of an Athlon II X2 250U and the GPU performance of a HD5400 or HD5500 series GPU then an Atom + ION combo won't even come close to the performance that would offer.
If this system can make a nice HTPC with limited gaming capability, I might be game. And this is just because I deposited my last check from Intel last week. ;)
Did you get a good paycheck from intel this week?
You may want to look into an Atom-based system. I built a home server using one several months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole system (including 4 500GB HDDs, minus monitor) only uses 36 watts according to my Kill-A-Watt. The chip is passively-cooled with a big aluminum heat sink, so the only fan in the system is a big 120mm on the rear of the case. It runs cool, even tucked away in a corner under a desk in my home office.
I've been thinking about buying another to replace an old Dell P4 I'm using as a HTPC when it finally croaks (which it will. Soon. It's one of the shoddy Optiplex models they're being sued over), but this all-in-one solution may be a more viable option.
I hope the final product is passively cooled and the whole thing with disks, 4GB of memory and other IO takes under 60W at full load so I can build that nice, small computer for the little sister moving out of home. The Ontario family should have some "cooler" members as well..
I agree with Dan, but I'm mad as a box of frogs.
Boy, can you read? "Word on the street is that AMD's Ontario chip will have the same power as an Athlon II X2 250U, but with a DirectX 11 graphics chip built in and running on only 18W." 18 watts for everything. I'm not going to argue about the rest you said because i couldnt care less about it, i use a CPU + discrete in my PC and will not use ontario. But man, you gotta start reading more accurately
Umm...did you read the article? It's 18 W for the CPU + GPU + Northbridge. And, given that it will be profoundly more capable than the Atom at pretty much everything , I think it will be quite competitive, in both performance and power.
18 watts for the Graphics chip alone? I get that it's more powerful than an X3100, but people aren't building their HTPCs as FPS machines. A high end dual core Atom is 13 Watts FOR EVERYTHING.
AMD, you fail once again.