AMD Unveils Elite A-Series APUs With Enhanced Performance, Improved Efficiency

MojoKid writes "AMD has just announced a new family of Elite A-Series APUs for mobile applications, based on the architecture codenamed 'Richland.' These new APUs build upon last year's 'Trinity' architecture, by improving graphics and compute performance, enhancing power efficiency through the implementation of a new 'Hybrid Boost' mode which leverages on-die thermal sensors, and offering AMD-optimized applications meant to improve the user experience. AMD is unveiling a new visual identity as well, with updated logos and clearer language, in a bid to enhance the brand. At the top of the product stack now is the AMD A10-5750M, a 35 Watt, 3.5GHz quad-core processor with integrated Radeon HD 8650G graphics, 4MB of L2 cache and a DDR3-1866 capable memory interface. The low-end is comprised of dual-cores with Radeon HD 8400G series GPUs and a DDR3-1600 memory interface."

Comments

On-die thermal sensors

[Byrel]

That qualifies as one of those inventions that make you wonder why it had to be invented... The utility is quite obvious.

Re:On-die thermal sensors

[r1348]

Not exactly, AMD had single-core power boosts since quite some time now. This is a refined version that calculates the boost based on real-time sensor data, instead of using conservative assumptions. So basically: the better you dissipate heat, the faster it goes.

Re:On-die thermal sensors

[dreamchaser]

They are both essentially dynamic overclocking, and both rely on thermal data. I'd say they are more alike than dissimilar. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that AMD has done this, but I'd much rather see IPC improvements than brute force attempts to lower the existing performance gap between the two vendors.

Re:On-die thermal sensors

[adolf]

That was 2001, not 2006.

whats the spec benchmark ?

[johnjones]

seriously show me numbers

also 9.6W for decoding MPEG is pretty horrendous but this is because I'm guessing they have to power the whole of the GPU rather than a simple specialised unit

where is the benchmark ?

regards

John Jones

Re:whats the spec benchmark ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to read the table under the barchart.
9.6W is at the System Level (i.e. whole netbook) while the APU Silicon itself is consuming 2.923W. Rest of the system would be the LCD, SATA HDD, memory, WiFi etc

Not sure where your MPEG part comes from as they didn't specify the encoding, only play back from HDD.

Re:whats the spec benchmark ?

[TubeSteak]

This was the first benchmark I found.
Keep in mind this new CPU is for mobile usage.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A-Series-A10-5750M-Notebook-Processor.87797.0.html

First PCMark 7 benchmarks show a performance increase of around 10 percent on the A10-4600M (5750M: 2175 points, 4600M: 1965 points).
Thus, the A10-5750M would place roughly at the level of a Core i3-2330M (Sandy Bridge).

Notebook Check is pretty awesome.
If anyone knows of a better/equal website for laptop hardware, I'd like to know

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[Khyber]

Only in single-threaded tasks. You get into multi-threaded and AMD begins to win outright.

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

We buy lots of them for our HPC cluster. We can get four 16-core CPUs in a 1U box. Each core is slower than an Intel core, but the price performance ratio is higher by a factor of two. Of course this only helps if your jobs are very paralyzable or you have lots of users (both of which apply to us).

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[router]

Because AMD unlike Intel (nawadays) makes next gen chips available for previous gen motherboards. So total cost of ownership is substantially lower with AMD than Intel. I got 3x performance boost on a several year old system this way. Because their motherboards are cheaper and use normal RAM (RDRAM debacle, anyone?). Because Intel has tried and failed to screw the enthusiast consumer for decades (except for that celeron 300 -> 450 thing, that rocked). Because their multithreaded performance is better, because their 8 core chips are cheaper, and some of us run an operating system and compute jobs that take full advantage of multiple cores. Because some of us _like_ AMD, and their continued existence means lower CPU prices for everyone.

Maybe that's why.

andy

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[SQL Error]

Likewise for our database clusters. We use open-source software (MongoDB, Redis, Riak) so hardware cost matters - if you use Oracle or something like that, software costs dominate. If you want large 4-socket servers, AMD offers much better value than Intel. And if you want lots of small 1S servers, AMD wins again, because the E3 Xeons only support 32GB RAM.

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[Zuriel]

You've never run a video transcode or compiled anything, have you?

I transcode Fraps recordings and upload them to Youtube, transcode bluray video for my Nexus 7, my MythTV backend often has transcode and commflag jobs queued that could run in parallel with no performance loss if it had more cores. 7-Zip will happily multithread compression tasks across dozens of cores. None of that is particularly exotic.

When you say "real world shit" you're talking about games, right? Be aware that there are things other than World of Warcraft that will tax a CPU, and they aren't imaginary or hypothetical.

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[Zuriel]

The vast majority of software that exists won't max out an AMD E-350 netbook chip. Put things in perspective here: we're talking about the minority of software that will actually tax a system.

A lot of programs are single threaded or do almost all of their work in a single thread, and don't really benefit from more cores. Other programs scale almost linearly with number of cores. I was only making the point that software that takes advantage of many cores isn't as rare as the great grandparent seems to think. AMD's multi-threading advantage with its 8 core chips isn't just something that AMD fanboys babble about, there's real benefits in real software that people actually use.

Re:AMD even still relevant?

[kermidge]

I'm not sure which to blame - I've no known easy way to figure it out - but when I turn off WCG with BOINC (full-time at 100%) and I play Civ V under Crossover XI on a 64-bit Linux using a AMD 1090 I can see all cores being used. Loads range from ~30% to max. I like to see that I'm getting my money's worth out of those cores.

I've been glad to have run a Phenom quad, a Phenom II quad, and now the hexa-core off the same mobo because it saved me money.