As if the new ARM plans weren't enough, the company expands its chip series

Oct 30, 2012 08:52 GMT  ·  By

There are already Z-Series, E-Series and A-Series accelerated processing units, but Advanced Micro Devices has some more to introduce, bearing the FirePro brand that, until now, only belonged to professional graphics cards.

So far, AMD has only begun selling the processors in Japan, alongside the reference design for micro-ATX motherboards (PC Partner is the manufacturer). We will cover the motherboard first.

As some have no doubt guessed already, the mainboard is equipped with the FM2 socket (8-phase digital PWM power supply), which all other current-generation APU-compatible mainboards possess.

Four DDR3 memory slots are wired to the socket, enabling a maximum of 64 GB of RAM (DDR3-1866 MHz), although one has to wonder how that level will be reached when DIMM modules are limited to 8 GB each.

The expansion capabilities, at the very least, make sense. A PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot will hold graphics cards, while a second and third slot (x4 and x1) can accept other add-in adapters.

A legacy PCI slot is available as well, along with eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports (SATA III), several video outputs (dual-link DVI, dual-link DisplayPort, D-Sub), Gigabit Ethernet and HD audio.

And now we can finally describe the two processors themselves. For starters, the FirePro A300 is a quad-core with 3.4 GHz / 4.0 GHz Turbo clock speeds, a 760 MHz GPU and a TDP (thermal design power) of 65W.

The FirePro A320 has a TDP of 100 W, but it is stronger than its siblings, with a frequency of 3.8 GHz / 4.2 GHz Turbo and a GPU of 800 MHz.

The L2 cache memory is 4MB for both newcomers. Unfortunately, Hermitage Akihabara (that is where the announcement was made) has not said what prices AMD expects in return for the chips or the motherboard. We will just have to wait for sales to begin in other regions.

Photo Gallery (4 Images)

AMD FirePro A300
AMD FirePro A320AMD reference motherboard
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