[citation][nom]saturnus[/nom]Although on the whole it looks like an extremely good APU that probably will perform far beyond it's immediate Intel competition there's still some design choices that intrigues me.Primarily, it seems odd to develop a propritary southbridge interface (UMI) when it would have been much more cost and power effective to include a few more gatable PCIe controllers on die instead. And thereby have all non-display/non-memory related off-die communication consolidated into a single standard interface.That would enable much more cost-effective 3rd party controller chips, like standard PCIe USB chips, standard PCIe legacy i/o chips, standard PCIe SATA controllers, and so on. It would offer much more versatility for OEM design, at an even better price point.I also seems odd to have a on-die VGA DAC when that could just as easily have been relegated to be produced from a 3rd party HDMI-to-VGA bridge controller. It would have saved some die real-estate as well as not having to directly support a legacy display that is rapidly disappearing.[/citation]
UMI is based on pci-e, or at least that is how it connects to the cpu (which has 8 pci-e lanes)