AMD has pulled off quite an impressive feat with Zacate. On the CPU front, the dual Bobcat cores clearly play in the same league as Intel's entry-level CULV and CULV 2010 processors. That means performance largely acceptable for everyday tasks, from web surfing to file compression. Even enthusiasts using an ultraportable or a nettop as their second or third PC ought to find this kind of performance acceptable. On the graphics front, meanwhile, Zacate succeeds in outpacing both previous AMD solutions and current Intel ones by a fair margin. The only system that came close was our Zotac nettop, which has an Nvidia Ion integrated graphics chipset. You'll be hard-pressed to find any ultraportable notebooks toting that kind of hardware these days, though; the closest thing you'd probably find would be something with a discrete, next-generation Ion GPU, and that's a different class of hardware—nothing like the elegant two-chip Zacate-Hudson combo AMD will offer as part of the Brazos platform.
Hot Hardware concludes with the following.
There are three high-level areas of performance we can consider when looking back through the benchmark data for AMD's Zacate platform: general CPU performance, graphics/multimedia performance and performance-per-watt. In terms of general CPU performance, this early engineering sample of Zacate proved itself to be faster than a 1.8GHz dual-core Atom processor across the board and in some tests, like our Lame MT audio encoding test, it was significantly faster. On the GPU side of things, Zacate performs a lot like a dual-core Atom system backed up by NVIDIA's Ion 2 chip, only Zacate does this all on a single chip/die and at decidedly lower power consumption at idle and under load. To us, that looks like a hat-trick.
So far so good for AMD's new chip. I can't wait to upgrade to one of these from my current Gateway single core Neo setup.