News - AMD refreshes line-up of A-series performance APUs

[HEXUS]

Introductions from 3.0GHz 100W right down to 1.8GHz 35W.

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[Jedibeeftrix]

"A8-3520M - Four CPU cores, 1.6 GHz CPU base (2.5 GHz Turbo Core), 35W TDP, 400 Radeon Cores, 4 MB L2 cache"

Looks like an excellent mobile chip, would love to see one in a slimline 13" chassis sans optical drives.

[scaryjim]

35W TDP might prevent that, it's at the higher end for a mobile chip. You normally only get sub 20W chips in that territory. Got to wonder why the dual core / 160sp chips are up at the 35W end though: If they can do quad core / 400sp chips in a 35W envelope you'd think they could get a chip cut back that heavily into a much lower TDP...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Scaryjim I think the E2 series might be salvaged A8 quad cores. Of course the other explanation is they are simply much lower binned chips which means there are greater yields.

[scaryjim]

I guess, although they should still be able to cut the TDP: Sempron 140s are harvested X2s, and when you disable the second core you get a ~ 20W power draw reduction (or rather when you enable the second core you get a 20W power draw increase!) which makes sense given they have 45W and 65W TDPs respectively. Llano must have a lot of leakage in the inactive chunks of silicon if they can't manage any reduction in TDP when more than half the die is turned off!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Look at the Athlon II X4 631 - it has the same TDP as a Llano A6-3650. Having said that the Athlon II X4 had a relatively high TDP too as you can get 95W Phenom II X4 and X6 CPUs. Perhaps by setting the stock voltage higher they can validate most rejected parts with the higher TDP.

I can remember in one review the 65W A6-3650 triple core has the same CPU and GPU power consumption as a A4-3400 dual core. The A4-3400 is clocked 600MHZ higher per core although it has 2MB less L2 cache and 160 shaders less in the IGP.

It would be interesting to see how far the A4 and A6 can be undervolted though.

[Jedibeeftrix]

they were supposed to create a native dual-core Llano but i guess it got scrapped due to the rapid transition to trinity.

[Lucio]

It's still a shame that the on-board APU is limited to teaming with only the lower end GPU's. If this could be paired up with a proper gaming-grade card, you'd have the ideal under the TV system, low powered APU for dealing with video de-codes, coupled with a noisier gaming card for when you needed it.

[cjs150]

For an HTPC the A8-3520 looks very nice, now all I need is the right board and something that looks like the Zotac Nano AD-10

[Jedibeeftrix]

35W TDP might prevent that, it's at the higher end for a mobile chip. You normally only get sub 20W chips in that territory.

shouldn't be that bad surely?

laptops like the new chronos 7 series come with a 17W intel cpu and a 17W 6470m gpu...............

[cppmonkey]

Not a huge jump in performance. My A8-3850 wasn't any faster than my very old Phenom II 940+ with DDR2-1066

Was nice that I could play BF3 on the integrated GPU. The game still looks stunning in low