Tuesday, October 30th 2012
AMD FirePro APUs and Motherboards Start Selling
AMD's FirePro APUs built on the "Trinity" silicon, with the GPU feature-set of AMD's FirePro professional GPUs and durability of Opteron enterprise CPUs; and compatible motherboards made by PC Partner (Sapphire) have started selling in Japan. Among the new products on sale are the FirePro A300 (3.40 GHz CPU core, 4.00 GHz CPU TurboCore, 760 MHz GPU, quad-core, 65W), and FirePro A320 (3.80 GHz CPU core, 4.20 GHz CPU TurboCore, 800 MHz GPU, quad-core, 100W), and the AMD reference design micro-ATX motherboard, manufactured by PC Partner.
The motherboard features socket FM2, powered by an 8-phase digital PWM power supply to the APU socket, four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting 64 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz memory, expansion slots that include PCI-Express 2.0 x16, PCI-Express 2.0 x4, x1, and legacy PCI; eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, display outputs that include dual-link DVI, dual-link DisplayPort, and D-Sub. HD audio and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of it.
Source:
Hermitage Akihabara
The motherboard features socket FM2, powered by an 8-phase digital PWM power supply to the APU socket, four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting 64 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz memory, expansion slots that include PCI-Express 2.0 x16, PCI-Express 2.0 x4, x1, and legacy PCI; eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, display outputs that include dual-link DVI, dual-link DisplayPort, and D-Sub. HD audio and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of it.
14 Comments on AMD FirePro APUs and Motherboards Start Selling
Thanks for posting this article btarunr...this apu flew under my radar and I've followed the llano story quite closely. I have a llano in my DV6-6135dx and I've grown rather fond of it.
I will add...we've actually been testing some of our software on the HD 4000 IGP because it seems to be running better than on our higher end video cards. I say this in means of stability. The software was designed for XP, but we are running it on Win7 and it is Java based. As soon as we dial up the graphics, we have strange glitches in the program under nVidia/AMD cards...the HD 4000 has been pretty stable. We're looking forward to checking out Haswell and ditching workstation cards altogether, but this APU might provide another solution.
Best,
LC
When the GPU BIOS is integrated into the main BIOS, all you need to do is, find the right program to extract it. Then, you open it in the adequate BIOS editor, reinject it inside the main BIOS file, and voilà. :D
after all the W5000 aka cut down 7850 with performance within 1% of the HD7770 was 315% faster than my 7970 in Autodesk Maya and in general was 140-150% faster accross the board in other apps only in Open CL did the Radeon pull ahead. Is it driver based yes for the most part, but even driver modifications didnt let my 7970 overtake the FirePro
these FirePro APUs essentially form a good back bone for render rigs, and 2D CAD work for architectural firms. etc etc
Firepro series are not really different other than slight architectural change and driver support.