That's right, AMD shot themselves in the foot. Guess how many AMD chips these people are likely to buy in the future? Not many. Atom was bad but at least it never made it into rows and rows of 15.6" notebooks in stores.
APUS LAUNCHER 2.0 FULL
Obviously anyone who pays "full price" for a notebook expects to get a full featured notebook, not some cut down atom competitor.
While the new APUs don’t appear to have changed from previous Brazos chips, the platform has seen some updates. The 7000 branding essentially carries over from what we’ve seen on the other laptop GPUs, where everything below 7700M is simply a rebranded HD 6000M chip (which in some cases were rebranded HD 5000M chips). That still gives you DX11 and OpenCL 1.1 support, and given the CPU performance of Brazos-still substantially slower than any modern laptop CPU other than Intel’s Atom-there’s not really a need for more GPU performance.
APUS LAUNCHER 2.0 SERIES
There’s nothing even remotely similar to Southern Islands chips in Brazos, and the 80 core design has its roots in AMD’s 5000 series of GPUs. This looks like a marketing driven move, particularly with the HD 7000 branding of the GPUs. If you’re a little depressed about the rebranding of the Brazos Zacate as Brazos 2.0, you’re not alone. How often you’ll actually hit the higher GPU clocks isn’t exactly clear, but don’t count on being able to play the latest gaming blockbusters regardless. E-300 clocked the GPU at 488MHz, so the E1-1200 is only 12MHz (2.5%) faster E-450 had the GPU clock at 508MHz with a max Turbo clock of 600MHz, so the 523/680MHz clocks of the E2-1800 are 3% and 13% higher, respectively. The GPU gets a few more changes: first, AMD has rebranded the HD 6310/6320 as the HD 7310/7340, and second, the GPU clocks are higher. The E2-1800 is the replacement for the current E-450, with CPU clocks that are 50MHz higher, while the E1-1200 is also a dual-core die but with a lower 1400MHz clock-100MHz more than the previous E-300. If that looks strikingly similar to the current E-series APUs, that’s because “Brazos 2.0” is using the same die. Here’s the short list of the new APUs: AMD E-Series APU for Essential Notebooks and Desktops
So what exactly is new in the world of Brazos for 2012? Not much, actually, other than names and model numbers. AMD has shipped over 30 million units, and there are over 160 different designs using Brazos. Brazos has actually been a major success for AMD, particularly in emerging markets, as it handily beats Intel’s Atom offerings and costs very little to manufacture. AMD today announced their Brazos 2.0 APUs, also known as their 2012 AMD E-series APU.