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AMD Brings New Desktop Chips Down To 65W
crookedvulture writes "AMD's new Llano-powered A-series APUs have had a difficult birth on the desktop. The first chips were saddled with a 100W power rating, making them look rather unattractive next to Intel's 65W parts. Now, AMD has rolled out a 65W version of Llano that's nearly as fast as its 100W predecessor despite drawing considerably less power under load. This A8-3800 APU doesn't skimp on integrated graphics, which is key to Llano's appeal. If you're not going to be using the built-in Radeon, the value proposition of AMD's latest desktop APUs looks a little suspect."
if, the board you have is crossfire capable, and the generations match each other (it has to be in XXYY range and first XXes must match from what i know, but exceptions are possible), ati catalyst control center will see that you have crossfire possibility, and it may auto enable it. you may enable crossfire, or disable it. with windows 7 and vision control center more customizations may be possible, however if you consider that hardware acceleration is even used for web page rendering in firefox, you would probably leave it on all the time.
Read radical news here
Not sure if I'm supposed to spill the beans on this, but I'm an AC, dammit. I'm in their focus-group thing, and apparently they're working real hard on a Crossfire-like solution right now so your "free" on-chip GPU isn't being wasted if you throw down for a discrete card. They haven't been making much words about this, though. Odd.
Performance desktop user here... Let me know when they start beating out the i5-2500K or i7-2600K CPU performance wise (even if the chip is more expensive!). I've got my i7-2600K running at 4.4Ghz stable without playing with the voltages or running turbine aircraft engine coolers (matter of fact the PC is almost silent). I can't think of any features I am missing on my P67 rev2 board which would make me trade in the performance of the CPU I have either. I love this chip!
I used to like AMD quite a lot (P4 era), but then they started lagging behind big time once Intel ditched Netburst. They have been either a lot HOTTER or a lot SLOWER (or both) than Intel for what seems like years now without really being able to recover. The Sandy Bridge based chips from Intel just kinda bend them over the barrel at the end of the day too with the reduced price point Intel is using for them. The only thing AMD would possibly give me would be a higher core count for my dollars, but not necessarily a more efficient (HT on SB is really nice) or cooler running chip; sadly this is something they used to excel at doing.
Since I'm not interested in their integrated graphics this is most likely the exact reason why there is minimal to no attraction for me to these product offerings.