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."

Comments

"If"

[Baloroth]

The whole point of these chips is the built in Radeon, whether it's for GPU or GPGPU performance. I'm not even sure why you would compare it solely as a processor, and I'm quite sure that isn't a fair or reasonable comparison. Nor one anyone wants to make (who might actually buy a Llano). For high performance, you'll get a dedicated card anyways. Anyone looking at this will use the integrated Radeon, that's the point.

You WILL use the built-in radeon

[unity100]

http://pente.hubpages.com/hub/AMD-Fusion-APU-Processor-Specifications

for its possible to play starcraft 2 with that shit, even on a low end portable if it has the llano.

in a desktop, you can even crossfire it with its equivalent 6xxx card, therefore reaching major performance for ridiculous price.

if you went with a traditional route, you would need to get the cpu, and then get a separate 6xxx equivalent card, and then one more to do the crossfire.

llano pieces give you 1 good cpu and 1 good graphics card in one shot, and in future they will be upgradeable. you will be able to upgrade both the cpu and 'graphics card' of your rig by upgrading just 1 piece of hardware.

Re:You WILL use the built-in radeon

[unity100]

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.

Using the built-in Radeon

[Anonymous Coward]

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.