AMD's Canceled Deccan Platform to Be Replaced by Brazos 2.0 - Report

With the low-power Deccan platform reportedly canceled, AMD is now turning its attention in the direction of the recently unveiled Brazos 2.0 APUs to take the place of Wichita and Krishna in its partners ultra low-voltage (ULV) netbooks, notebooks and nettops.

The decision makes a lot of sense now that Deccan has been scrapped, although it won't surely offer the same bump in performance as that expected from the Wichita APUs.

According to a source cited by Xbit Labs, it seems like AMD's cancellation of this new platform was conditioned by a series of production problems, but at this point in time we can't tell if these issues were caused by glitches in the design of the APU or by TSMC's problems with the 28nm node.

The Brazos 2.0 platform that is supposed to take the place of Deccan is based on APUs including two Bobcat computing cores, built-in Radeon HD 7000 graphics adapters, and a single-channel DDR3 memory controller.

These will be paired with the new A68 Fusion controller hub (FCH), also known under the code name of Hudson D3L, that is supposed to bring USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support to AMD's ULV platform.

Initially, AMD's Brazos 2.0 lineup will include just the E2-1800 and E1-1200 accelerated processing units.

The former is a slightly improved version of the current E-450 accelerated processing unit launched earlier this year and it packs the same two computing cores as its predecessor, but with a 1.7GHz base clock speed and a slightly higher clocked GPU.

The AMD E1-1200 on the other hand has been designed to take the place of the E-300 and will feature a 100MHz frequency increase to work at 1.4GHz, and a Radeon HD 7310 on-die GPU that features an insignificant 12 MHz overclock compared to its predecessor.

Both these APUs will be pin-compatible with their FT1 counterparts, but installing the new FCH will require AMD's partners to slightly redesign their products as this uses the 656-pin BGA package instead of the 605-pin packaging of the previous A45.

According to the same source cited above, AMD will ramp up production of the 40nm Brazos 2.0 APUs in mid-February, 2012 while the first products to use them should make their appearance in Q2 2012.

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