14 DAY TRIAL // The past few months have not been lacking in the leaks department, but it seems two products from Advanced Micro Devices have finally become official, putting an end to most speculations.
The A-Series of accelerated processing units, codenamed Llano, Are AMD's main force on the mainstream segment.
With good processing capabilities and, at least as importantly, strong integrated graphics, they have made it harder for NVIDIA to sell mid-range video cards, the same way E-Series models challenged it on the low-end.
All A-Series units come with the AMD VISION Engine Software (AMD Catalyst driver, AMD OpenCL driver and AMD VISION Engine Control Center).
AMD's push on the mid-level market now continues, as made clear by the most recent press announcement on its part.
Basically, two Fusion A-Series APUs have entered the official mass-production stage, their names being A8-3850 and A6-3650.
They are quad-core units based on the x86 architecture, while their built-in graphics components have up to 400 cores.
HD video processing is, naturally, part of the asset list, as is DirectX 11 support and the Dual Graphics technology.
For those that want a reminder, Dual Graphics combines the might of an integrated graphics components with that of an add-in AMD Radeon HD 6000 card, for up to 120% visual performance increase.
For those that want some actual numbers, the A6-3650 has a core clock of 2.6 GHz, a GPU of 443 MHz with 320 Radeon Cores and 4 MB of L2 cache, plus 100W TDP (thermal design power).
Meanwhile, the A8-3850 is a 2.9 GHz part, has a 600 MHz GPU (with 400 cores), 4 MB of L2 cache and the same TDP.
They come with a suggested retail price of $115 and $135, respectively, and will work on any FM1 motherboard. Users can now start wondering how fast chips will be to integrate HD 7000 series graphics.