Print
AMD isn't letting a silly little thing like market share ruin its summer. Rather than hide under a rock from failing to make a dent in Intel's stranglehold on the chip market, even after the initial Sandy Bridge snafu, AMD has come out swinging this month with its Llano A-series accelerated processing units (APUs). Earlier this month saw the launch of AMD's mobile Llano chips, and now the Santa Clara chip maker is announcing the availability of two Llano A-series APUs for the desktop.
First up is the A6-3650 APU. This quad-core chip comes clocked at 2.6GHz with 4MB of L2 cache and a 100W TDP. The graphics engine is comprised of a Radeon 6530D with 320 cores, four SIMD units, 16 texture units, and a 443MHz clockspeed. Pricing has been set to $115.
The second and higher performing of the two is the A8-3850, another quad-core part, only this one is clocked at 2.9GHz. It sports the same amount of L2 cache (4MB) and TDP (100W), but boasts a Radeon HD 6550D with 400 cores, five SIMD units, 20 texture units, and a 600MHz clockspeed. This one carries an MSRP of $135.
Both chips are built around AMD's new FM1 socket and support DirectX 11, though neither one supports AMD's Turbo Core. These are the first two of six Llano A-series APUs AMD plans to launch this year, with the rest reportedly having a TDP of 65W, two to four processing cores, and support for Turbo Core 2.0.
Comments are closed on this article
bolod
December 23, 2011 at 2:24pm
I love to surf and my initial source for information is the blogs which have always helped me in my education. This blog is one of them.
bolod
December 23, 2011 at 2:24pm
I love to surf and my initial source for information is the blogs which have always helped me in my education. This blog is one of them.
niceperson_90
December 18, 2011 at 8:07am
Call of Duty has it's own flock of sheeple so there's no doubt that they'll make some cash off of this. I won't have anything to do with Call of Duty so it doesn't matter to me, but it's sad to see companies taking advantage and sucking as much money as possible from it's customers.Bungie offers the same feature abosolutely free. Except for that fact that if you want more than what they provided, you have to pay. Now that's fair.What Activision is doing is bullsh3t. Only TRUE COD fanboys would go for that kind of rubbish offer. That's my opinion about this option subscription thing btw.
Shalbatana
July 02, 2011 at 10:56pm
I can't wait to build a system with this. I don't know why but I gots the itchin. I think it will make a perfect budget build for my wife, who wants a micro or mini itx build. Such a system could hold her for years and keep maintenance to a minimum. Of course there's also the obvious choice of a htpc.
jackal49
June 30, 2011 at 4:39pm
I pulled the trigger on a Fusion build, and I must say I am impressed. I built an HTPC around the Sapphire Pure Fusion ITX board. I was expecting Netbook like performance on the desktop. What I got was closer to my 3-year-old gaming Asus notbook with a speedy Core 2 Duo.
I was angry at first because while playing blu rays, I was getting CPU utilization in the 80% range. Benchmarks around the web reported it to be 20-30%. Cyberlink didn't have support for Fusion graphics, so it was unusable. I went with Total Media Theatre, and that's where I got 80%.
just when I was thinking of getting rid of it, Total Media put out an update with support for... wait for it... Fusion APUs. So now, I have 25% utilization during blu ray playback. it is silent and cool. I have a quiet 40cm fan over the cpu block, and it has never gotten up to 50 C even during blu ray and downloading. Netflix, and Microsoft Silverlight, still does not support GPU acceleration, so it actually looks a little worse than my previous HTPC with a C2D 6420.
Long story short, if the Llanos can give the same level of all around performance on a more desktop mainstream level, then I whish i would've used that for my wife's gaming PC instead of a Phenom II X 4! It's hot and the fan is loud!
livebriand
June 30, 2011 at 2:05pm
Whoa! A nice CPU and GPU while not having a higher TDP than Intel's quad-cores? AND a low-price tag? This CPU may just find itself a place in my next build. And if I can dynamically OC the GPU like a regular discrete one, oh, and dynamically OC the CPU..... (I use MSI afterburner)
And if I can have crossfire with a discrete ATI GPU, preferably not having to be the same model...
Man, there is some real potential here.
Caboose
June 30, 2011 at 12:32pm
I'm wondering what kinda performance we'll see out of these. In both standard office tasks as well as some gaming.
And HTPC tasks as well.
So, since this is a GPU & CPU on a single socket, the motherboard will no longer have a graphics adapter on it, but just a VGA/HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort port right?
AETAaAS
June 30, 2011 at 2:12pm
I would say "enough" on the performance front for entry level users... :p
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview/1
Not sure what you meant by your last question, mobos still will pack PCI-E afaik but if you mean the IGP, I think they probably dropped it in the D3 chipsets.
AETAaAS
June 30, 2011 at 10:51am
I have to say that these new Llanos are priced at quite incredibly low points. Quad core with a proper GPU at only 115? Its undercutting even my predictions...
While I'm more interested in the upcoming Bulldozers, if AMD released a dual FM1 socket board, I may change my mind... :D
arkarkwin
June 30, 2011 at 10:41am
When will you guy be reviewing new AMD CPU line? I am itching for an upgrade since April. Since I got first gen i7 920, I was thinking about Sandy Bridge but I thought I would give AMD a shot ( I was an old AMD fan till i7 came out). I got myself an AMD 6950 (bios upgrade to 6970), and I want to run crossfire. I heard AMD graphic fares better on AMD platform (logical). However, gaming is not the only thing I do on my computer so whenever you guy are ready, just review the AMD line and make a verdict. I am going nut waiting for next big thing.
AETAaAS
June 30, 2011 at 11:02am
I'm partial towards AMD, but I don't think the CPU makes much difference towards graphic performance. Intel chips are fast however; you pay for that. The upcoming Bulldozers may shift things a bit but that remains to be seen. :)
For now, if you are doing CPU intensive tasks like encoding, and you have the spare change, a shiny new i7 wont go too wrong. :) Alternatively, grab the AMD 1100T, I've got a 1090T and I love it. Finally you can do the Maximum thing and OC your proc, but I don't know how it goes on the i7 920. I've been spoiled with the ease on AMD Blacks...
I've had a 9850BE, 940BE and now a 1090T BE. Overclocking became effortless. xD
