AMD Demonstrates the Thermal Superiority of Their Fusion APUs at CES 2011
As AMD's reputation in the notebook market space isn't one of the best around, the company held a demonstration at the 2011 Computer Electronics Show meant to prove once and for all the thermal superiority of their solutions when compared with Intel Atom based systems.
To make their point clear, the Sunnyvale-based company used four ultra-portables from different manufacturers, including an Atom N550 netbook and other three Brazos powered machines.
From those three models, one was using a Zacate APU, the E-350, while the other two were packing C-50 and C-30 Ontario accelerated processing units.
After starting to loop a 1080p H.264 video for some time, a company representative pulled out a $6000 thermal imaging device and went on to measure the temperatures recorded while running.
All the Brazos-based solutions managed to keep cooler than the Atom N550 netbook, as the AMD systems never got above 37 Celsius while the Intel machine reached about 44.5 degrees Celsius.
However, as the AnandTech website likes to point out, the results are hardly surprising as the Atom CPU used lacks any hardware HD video decoding and has to rely only on its processing power in order to get the job done.
On the other hand, the DirectX 11 class GPU found inside AMD's APUs, as well as the integrated UVD3 engine, have more than enough power to decode a 1080p video without being forced to rely on their Bobcat cores.
In addition, the thermal characteristics of a notebook depend a lot more on the cooling system used by the manufacturer than the CPU (or APU) that is installed inside.
This was the main reason why AMD-powered notebook has such a bad reputation in the market place as most laptop models that were released with the company's mobile processors were low-cost solutions and that fact reflected in their build quality.
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