14 DAY TRIAL // The Accelerated Processing Units that AMD had in the pipeline have been the talk of the web for a while and, finally, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has officially launched the new A-Series models.
The new APUs from Advanced Micro Devices have, among other things, two assets that set them apart from their predecessors.
One is the Steady Video technology, which stabilizes videos during playback and eliminates shakes and jitter.
Users only need to enable the technology through the Catalyst Control Center on the VISION Engine Control Center application.
The other thing is that the new APUs, or at least the A8-3870K and A6-3670K, have unlocked multipliers (the K in the name denotes it).
In other words, it is possible to overclock the chips, and that goes for both the x86 cores as well as the Radeon HD 6500 graphics.
There are both desktop APUs as well as notebook accelerated processing units.
Of the former, the A8-3870K is the strongest, with four CPU cores at 3.0 GHz, the already mentioned unlocked multiplier, 100W TDP, 400 Radeon cores, 600 MHz GPU (also unlocked) and 4 MB L2 cache.
The other unlocked chip, A6-3670K, has four CPU cores at 2.7 GHz, 100W TDP, 320 Radeon cores, 600 MHz for the GPU and 4 MB L2 cache.
The other three desktop chips are A8-3820 (quad-core 2.5 GHz / 2.8 GHz Turbo Core, 65W TDP, 400 Radeon cores, 4 MB L2 cache) A6-3620 (quad-core 2.2 GHz / 2.5 GHz Turbo Core, 65W TDP, 320 Radeon cores, 4 MB L2 cache) and A4-3420 (dual-core at 2.8 GHz, 65W TDP, 160 Radeon cores, 1 MB L2 cache).
The notebook series is a bit more extensive, made of eight chips, four of which are quad-core units (1.5 GHz to 2.0 GHz / 2.4 to 2.7 GHz Turbo Core, 4 MB cache, 320 or 400 Radeon cores) and four dual-core models (1.8 GHz to 2.2 GHz / 2.4 GHz to 2.6 GHz Turbo Core, 1 or 2 MB cache, 160 / 240 Radeon cores).
All the notebooks parts have a TDP of 35W, except for the MX versions, which need 45W.
The full chip collection is listed here and should start showing up in PCs shortly, probably in quite a few systems headed for CES 2012.