The APU was found in a Hewlett-Packard all-in-one PC

Aug 18, 2012 08:20 GMT  ·  By

AMD may have designed some central processing units without GPUs that, somehow, are still part of the Trinity family, but most such products are still accelerated processing units, like the A6-5400K.

The A6-5400K is one of the APUs that AMD did not spend too much time individually promoting, allowing market watchers to spot it on their own.

The chip was discovered in HP's Pavilion 23-1000z All-in-One Desktop PC, which we will cover separately at a later time.

It is a dual-core model (which is to say it has just one Piledriver module) built on the 32nm manufacturing process and clocked at 3.6 GHz, although the Turbo Core technology can push things to 3.8 GHz when needed.

That said, the integrated graphics processor is the Radeon HD 7540D, which, for some reason, is not part of the list of processors supported by the AMD Catalyst Display Driver 12.8.

It boasts 192 shader cores and a 760 GPU speed, not nearly close to the likes of add-in boards like Radeon HD 7950, but enough for anything except serious gaming.

No need for concerns though. Since the chip ships as part of pre-configured systems, all the necessary software, from the OS to the drivers, is conveniently present and accounted for.

Going back to the APU specifications, AMD gave the A6-5400K APU 1 MB of shared L2 cache memory, a DDR3 memory controller and all the latest x86 instructions, including AES and AVX.

As for supported technologies, AMD64, AMD-V and, of course, Turbo Core 3.0, without which there would be none of the dynamic overclocking specified above.

Finally, the processor runs on 65W of energy and fits socket FM2 platforms.

All in all, the AMD A6-5400K APU is a more than decent fit for all-in-one systems and even mainstream PCs, so we expect it to be used in computers besides HP's lone AiO.