AMD’s Bobcat hits the ground running

Leaked specs indicate that AMD’s Bobcat processor core has hit the ground running.

According to Bit-Tech, AMD’s Bobcat-based “Ontario” APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) is reportedly capable of achieving 1,352 GFLOPS of floating-point performance.

“To put this in context, [it] is just over twice the performance of an Intel Atom D510 CPU, but falls 15 per cent short of a low power Athlon II X2 250u,” explained Bit Tech’s Richard Swinburne.

“[Yes], it’s disappointing that AMD’s new architecture seems to be beaten out by a processor based on the aging K10 architecture, [but it is] worth remembering that Ontario based APU’s are reported to operate at only 18W and include a DirectX 11 graphics core to boot.”

Although Intel’s Atom D510 only draws 13W, Swinburne noted that Ontario’s superior performance and “graphical wizardry” may very well be “worth” the extra 5W.

“These figures are broadly in line with AMD’s early claim that its Bobcat based Ontario APU core would feature 90 per cent of 2010’s mainstream performance in just 50 per cent of the die area.”