AMD's Fastest Llano APU Will Retail for Less than $150

Expected to be made official by AMD at the end of the month, the first desktop Llano accelerated processing units begun to make their appearance in various online shops, and the price of the company's fastest APU, the A8-3850, seems to be set at no more than $150 USD.

Some online retailers have listed the chip for even less ($143.77), which seems to suggest that AMD's recommended price tag sits somewhere in the $140 area.

The AMD A8-3850 APU is the fastest desktop Llano CPU to be introduced and it packs four processing cores which operate at 2.9GHz, 4MB of Level 2 cache, a dual-channel DDR3-1866 memory controller 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 an Hybrid CrossFireX mode.

Apart from the A8-3850 APU, online retailers have also added the A6-3650 to their offer, and its pricing is set at just a bit over $120 USD.

Just like its more powerful sibling, this APU also includes four processing cores and 4MB of Level 2 cache, but its operating frequency was lowered to 2.6GHz.

In addition, the integrated graphics core is also a bit slower since it packs only 320 stream processor clocked at 443MHz.

Outside of the on-die graphics core, Llano chips also feature an integrated dual-channel DDR3 memory controller and a 16 lane PCI Express Gen 2.0 controller.

AMD's Llano APUs 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 support which is only found in the more advanced A75 FCH.

As noted earlier, AMD is expected to launch the desktop version of the Llano accelerated processing units on June 30. (via ComputerBase)