Sapphire release first APU ‘Fusion’ motherboard

Sapphire have just announced their first mainboard based on the new Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) architecture, from Sapphire. They have been working closely with AMD to produce this board, which is called the ‘Pure White Fusion E350M1W'.

This is a mini ITX mainboard which features the E350 Zacate APU from AMD. Zacate is the first generation of APU – a combination of CPU and GPU computing technologies onto a single die to improve the performance of both visual and data-intensive tasks. For the first time it combines high-performance serial computing and parallel graphics processing cores on a single chip. The SAPPHIRE Pure White Fusion E350M1W also uses the companion Hudson-M1 (A50M) Chip from AMD.

The graphics engine of the SAPPHIRE Pure White Fusion E350M1W delivers a full DX 11 feature set over a choice of three display outputs of which any pair can be used concurrently. Maximum resolution is 2560 x 1600 over the D-Sub, and 1920 x 1080 over HDMI or the DVI-D output. The SAPPHIRE Pure White Fusion E350M1W can comfortably display HD video content, and will accelerate content in the latest web browsers and Microsoft Office environments as well as in specific supported applications.

Up to 4GB of system memory can be installed, using industry standard 1.5v DDR3 (1066/800) un-buffered SO-DIMMs. Hard drive and optical drive support is provided by five SATA III ports with 6Gb/s transfer rates, and there is an additional eSATA connector on the rear panel with 3Gb/s transfer rate for external drive access.

Extensive I/O connections include eight USB 2.0 ports ports supporting transfer speeds of up to 480Mbps (four on the rear panel plus four by onboard header), plus two USB 3.0 ports on the rear panel (backward compatible with USB 2.0), supporting transfer speeds up to 4.8Gbps. One Gigabit Ethernet connection is provided by a Marvell 88E8057 Gigabit controller, and Bluetooth support by an Atheros AR3011 all-CMOS, single chip solution compatible with Bluetooth® 2.1 + EDR. The on-board Audio support includes 8-channel High-Definition audio and optical S/PDIF output.

In addition to all the on-board features, the SAPPHIRE Pure White Fusion E350M1W has two expansion slots. It has one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 connector with x4 bandwidth, designed for use with an expansion VGA card, and one general purpose Mini PCI-Express 2.0 x1 connector.

Despite the huge feature set, the SAPPHIRE Pure White Fusion E350M1W features very low power consumption. Its very compact mini-ITX (170 x 170mm) format is ideal for integration into small format or embedded systems. It supports Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems for a new class of performance from highly integrated systems.

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