Thursday, September 8th 2011
AMD Readies Two Unlocked A-Series APUs
In the fourth quarter of 2011, AMD will unveil new A-Series APUs in the socket FM1 package, these include not one (as reported back in July), but two models that come with unlocked base clock multipliers. Unlocked multipliers made overclocking significantly easier. While AMD won't use the "Black Edition" moniker, it will use the "K" extension. Incidentally, "K" stands for "black" in the CMYK colour model.
AMD's unlocked APUs include the A8-3870K and the A6-3670K, which are 100 MHz faster than the A8-3850 and A6-3650, respectively. With its four x86-64 cores clocked at 3.00 GHz, the A8-3870K features 400 stream processors running at 600 MHz on its Radeon GPU component, while the A6-3670K CPU cores are clocked at 2.70 GHz, and the chip has 320 stream processors running at 444 MHz. The two chips, however, will not feature TurboCore technology for the CPU cores.
Source:
X-bit Labs
AMD's unlocked APUs include the A8-3870K and the A6-3670K, which are 100 MHz faster than the A8-3850 and A6-3650, respectively. With its four x86-64 cores clocked at 3.00 GHz, the A8-3870K features 400 stream processors running at 600 MHz on its Radeon GPU component, while the A6-3670K CPU cores are clocked at 2.70 GHz, and the chip has 320 stream processors running at 444 MHz. The two chips, however, will not feature TurboCore technology for the CPU cores.
43 Comments on AMD Readies Two Unlocked A-Series APUs
from xbit labs llano review:
[INDENT]Judging by the results of typical processor tests we can conclude that Llano overclocking makes a lot of sense and you shouldn’t neglect it if the opportunity presents itself. 26% increase in the processor frequency from the nominal 2.9 GHz to 3.66 GHz allowed to boost the performance almost proportionally: by 25% on average. At the same time, when you overclock by raising the BCLK frequency and at the same time reducing the processor clock multiplier delivers a guaranteed better result, even though the memory doesn’t work at its maximum speed at 141 MHz BCLK. Overall, memory frequency doesn’t affect the purely processor tests that much at all. The performance difference will be on average 2.5% when you change the DDR3 frequency multiplier by 1 step.[/INDENT]
:toast:
With locked overclocking the most important aspect is the motherboard. With a bad board you won't get far.
This is probably the best article out there:
www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ga-a75-ud4h.html
^ read it. Hopefully it helps someone reading this forum.
I'm a performance nut at heart and love spending gobs of time figuring out max overclocks. FM1 + A8-3850 was for me since:
1- Simple flat board allows me to take it overseas without too much trouble
2- One good cooler does the trick for both CPU and GPU. I don't have to worry about GPU noise or GPU failures.
3- 6550D is sufficient for gaming etc, and O/C is icing on the cake
4- I love speed, but honestly, the K10.5 arch at 3.5ghz in quad core config is plenty of power for anything
5- AMD worked wonders on power gating etc and revamped power consumption pre-O/C
6- Fully featured A75M-UD2H motherboard was only $100!
7- CPU price was very attractive
Overall i'm thrilled with it but haven't spent too much time on it, yet. Wish I could have grabbed a K-series but alas, not yet available. Back to old school overclocking we go!
Who cares if they both use K for unlocked CPU's, now the APU gets interesting, see how these things do unlocked, and can you somehow enable any disabled cores?
The GPU doesn't need to be unlocked as you can change it anywhere from 200 MHz to 2 GHz core. It is pointless to go over 600 MHz if your RAM is 1866 MHz or below as the RAM will limit performance long before the additional core speed will.
And the bclk change only limits overclock on boards with no automatic dividers like Biostar and ECS. The GIGABYTE boards seem to have a huge advantage in overclocking locked APUs. These "K" APUs will level the playing field in this regard.
i want to be able to unlock graphics cores from the bios like you would with CPU cores
but, i would also like to have clock control of the gpu from the bios, so that you don't have to have afterburner etc, running all the time, not too important, but they did it with some integrated graphics cards so they must be able to do it here
EVEN is APU sucks in performance overall, you can just OC against other APUs its theo nly fun new thing to OC, you get FSB! OC is the funnest, and now we get multiplier and FSB, its what SandyBridge shodul have been IMO. ALso I am more of an Intel Fan, but you know.