14 DAY TRIAL // The Fusion Ontario accelerated processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices may be an entry-level component, but it appears its maker decided to implement some dynamic overclocking anyway.
One of the assets that today's central processing units from Intel and AMD have is the ability to modify their own clock speeds.
While frequency modifications were usually restricted to voltage tweaks and, in the case of compatible chips, overclocking software, this is no longer the case.
In fact, this hasn't been the case for quite a while, as Intel and, eventually, AMD both implemented Turbo dynamic overclocking.
Known as Turbo Boost for the former and Turbo Core for the latter, the technologies can downclock unused cores and boost used ones, provided applications can't use them all at once.
It seems AMD wants its Fusion APUs to feature this technology, down to some of the most unassuming of the lot.
Granted, with their graphics, even the weakest of APUs can handle casual games and multimedia at least as well, sometimes even better, than mobile PC solutions with Atom chips of better frequencies.
The Ontario, otherwise known as C-50, is a product that was released back at the start of January and has two cores clocked at 1 GHz.
It is now reported that a new processor will come to supplement the C-30 and C50, one dubbed C-60.
It will be identical to the C-50, with two x86 Bobcat cores and a base speed of 1.0 GHz, but it will have the benefit of Turbo Core.
As such, the frequency will go as high as 1.3 GHz, while the built-in Radeon HD 6250 GPU (graphics processing unit) can be pushed form 276 MHz to 400 MHz.
It is unclear just when the launch will be made, but it should be in the third quarter, possibly in time for the back-to school period, meaning that it may clash with Intel's Atom N570 dual-core.