AMD Launches New C- and E-Series Accelerated Processing Units

These low-power series of Fusion APUs support ultrathin and value netbooks, notebooks, all-in-ones and desktop PCs, AMD said in a statement. The enhancements unveiled today include upgrades to graphics capabilities and battery life.

The E-Series line now offers two new chips -- E-450 and E-300 -- with DDR3 1333 and HDMI support. Both include two CPU cores integrated onto the same die as 80 Radeon GPU cores. The E-450 increased the fastest existing E-Series clock speeds by 50 MHz to 1.65 GHz and introduced Turbo Core functionality to the product line, providing 600 MHz GPU clock speed with the boost and 508 MHz without.

The E-300 features a clock speed of 1.3 GHz and a GPU clock speed of 488 MHz. This represents a drop in both CPU and GPU clock speeds from the previous low-end E-Series chip, E-240, but provides an additional CPU core over the previous single-core product.

The new C-Series APU, C-60, also runs two cores operating at 1 GHz clock speed and 276 MHz GPU clocks, with the Turbo Core option for speeds up to 1.33 GHz and 400 MHz, respectively. The new E-Series and C-Series chips continue to support DirectX-11 and increase battery life by more than four hours over previous platforms, AMD said.

"Today's PC users want stunning HD graphics and accelerated performance with all-day battery life and that's what AMD Fusion APU's deliver," Chris Cloran, vice president and general manager of the client division at AMD, said in the statement.

In the second quarter of 2011, AMD sold over 5 million C-Series and E-Series APU's, the company said. The Fusion APU platform produced second fiscal quarter profits and led AMD to estimate a 10 percent increase in revenue for Q3, based on strong expectations for APU sales.