14 DAY TRIAL // In the short time that AMD's desktop Llano APUs have been out on the market, a series of CPU-Z screenshots have revealed these chips reaching frequencies well above 5GHz, but the real surprise seems to be that, while these reports seem legit, the APUs don't actually work at the trumpeted clock speed.
According to OCWorkbench, even though the AMD A8-3850 accelerated processing unit appears to sport an unlocked multiplier, this isn't actually the case as setting this over the default 29x value doesn't bring any improvement in performance.
As a result, the high clock speeds that are reported by both CPU-Z and the BIOS are actually erroneous and the chip still operated at 2.9GHz, even if some tools return higher than stock frequencies.
Right now, we don't know if the error is caused by some sort of motherboard BIOS glitch or if some other issue is to blame.
The A8-3850 accelerated processing unit was introduced on June 30 and is AMD's most powerful Fusion chip to date.
The APU packs four processing cores, which operate at 2.9GHz, 4MB of Level 2 cache, and a Radeon HD 6550D graphics unit.
This includes no less than 400 shader units clocked at 600MHz and can work together with select discrete graphics cards in a Hybrid CrossFireX mode.
Outside of the on-die graphics core, Llano chips also feature an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz memory controller and a 16-lane PCI Express Gen 2.0 controller.
The accelerated processing units are compatible with socket FM1 motherboards. These can be powered by the A55 or A75 chipset, and both offer similar features, except for USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support, which are only found in the more advanced A75 FCH.
The AMD A8-3850 APU is available right as we speak from various worldwide retailers and in the US this sells for about $139.99.