14 DAY TRIAL // We knew about AMD’s intention to update its A-Series notebook APU lineup for quite some time now and yesterday the chip maker has fulfilled its plans by quietly introducing seven new accelerated processing units featuring quad and dual-core designs.
With this refresh, AMD chose to take a similar path as that employed by Intel when updating its CPUs and slightly boosted the specs of its new chips over those of their predecessors.
Four out of the seven CPUs introduced by AMD are from the A8 and A6 series which means that they include four processing cores, while the remaining three are A4 chips with dual computing cores.
The fastest of these quad-core models is the A8-3550MX which compared to its predecessor got 100MHz higher base and Turbo Core speeds, making it the first Llano mobile processors to reach the 2GHz frequency (2.7GHz in Turbo mode).
However, the specs of the graphics core were left unaltered and the chip sports the same Radeon HD 6620G integrated GPU which operated at 444MHz.
The remaining APUs launched by AMD also take a similar approach and just increase their base and Turbo frequencies with 100MHz over those of their predecessors, while the rest of the specs are left unaltered.
As Hardcore Hardware reports, the only exception to this rule is the entry-level A4-3305M, which works at the same frequencies as the previous A4-3300M, but now gets a new graphics core and a smaller amount of cache memory (1MB vs 2MB in the A4-3300M).
The new GPU is actually less powerful than the one in the A4-3300M as it comes with just 160 shader processors in comparison with the 240 shaders installed in the previous model, but received a higher operating frequency (593MHz vs 444MHz) to make up for this setback.
No info regarding pricing was made public by AMD, but the new Llano chips are expected to start making their way into laptops by the end of this year.
