14 DAY TRIAL // Launched in mid-June 2011, AMD's A-Series mobile accelerated processing units have now arrived in the UK, where online retailers have started selling the Toshiba L755D and the HP DV6-6102EA notebooks.
The first of the two machines to make their appearance, the Toshiba L755D, is available right as we speak from stock at PC World, Currys and Dixons, where is priced at £649.99.
For this much money, the 15.6-inch laptop offers its buyers an AMD A6-3400M APU, which is paired together with 6GB of DDR3 system memory as well as with a 320GB hard drive.
The A6-3400M is one of AMD's mainstream A-Series accelerated processing units and packs four computing cores clocked at 1.4GHz (up to 2.3GHz in Turbo mode), 4MB of Level 2 cache and a Radeon HD 6520G integrated graphics card (320 stream processor working at 400MHz).
Outside of the core hardware listed above, Toshiba's L755D notebook also features a DVD burner, WiFi 802.11b/g/n and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, a 1.3 megapixels webcam, HDMI and VGA video outputs, as well as a memory card reader.
The display has a native resolution of 1366x768 pixels, while the battery pack should be able to deliver up to 5 and a half hours of running time. The notebook's weight is listed at 2.5Kg.
The second notebook to start selling, the HP DV6-6102EA, is also using a 15.6-inch panel with a native resolution of 1366x768 pixels, but it sports a faster 1.6GHz quad-core APU, the A6-3410MX, as well as a dedicated graphics card.
This can work in tandem with the Radeon HD graphics core found inside the AMD chip, in a special CrossFireX mode, to deliver improved performance.
The rest of the specifications list includes 4GB of system memory, a 750GB hard drive, a dual-layer DVD burner with LightScribe labeling, Beats Audio sound system with quad speakers, 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth networking as well as a pair of USB 3.0 ports.
The HP Pavilion DV6-6102EA notebook is available from John Lewis where is priced at £549.