AMD Introduces Vision A6-3650 and A8-3850 Desktop APUs

[btarunr]

AMD announced two of its first Vision A-Series accelerated processing units (APUs) for desktops today. Built in the socket FM1 package, the A6-3650 and A8-3850 are fabricated on the 32 nm HKMG process. Both pack four x86-64 cores, and while the A6 has 320 stream processors in the GPU component, the A8 has 400 of them. Both chips have 4 MB of cache, dual-channel DDR3-1866 MHz IMCs, and PCI-Express 2.0 hubs to drive discrete graphics.

The AMD A8-3850 has its four x86-64 cores clocked at 2.90 GHz, with the Radeon HD 6550D GPU engine clocked at 600 MHz. This chip has a TDP of 100W, it is priced at US $135. The AMD A6-3650 has its CPU component clocked at 2.60 GHz, and Radeon HD 6530D GPU engine clocked at 443 MHz. This chip goes for US $115. With these two, AMD is targeting higher models of Sandy Bridge-based Pentium Dual-Core and Core i3 Sandy Bridge chips. Both will be available in stores by July 3.



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[Fourstaff]

2.9Ghz? Phenom II already has problems trying to go against the Sandy Bridge chips at 3.5Ghz, what makes this a good competitor? Probably in office work, but even then you would want the cheaper i3 and it takes lower power consumption to boot. Too expensive imo.

 

[RejZoR]

Maybe because of wastly superior IGP inside A6 ? Intel graphic cores are absolute rubbish...

 

[Fourstaff]

Maybe because of wastly superior IGP inside A6 ? Intel graphic cores are absolute rubbish...

The only target for this is your budget gamer, richer ones will go for i3+mid end graphics, which is only about $150 more expensive depending on graphics card, and I am quite sure it will be a few miles ahead in the framerate department.

 

[zsolt_93]

It's a totally new market... Nobody made APUs before. Intel tried but failed in terms of IGFX. So we can only speculate how this situation will end up. Will AMD be able to create market for products and make money from it or will they just be able to sell what they produce and cover the costs of the development as they did with the first Phenoms which went pretty much unobserved and then when Phenom II appeared BOOM the Intel C2Qs were wiped out but (un)fortunately Nehalem was close making AM3 a budget platform and increasing sales against the pricier Intel products despite inferior performance.
The only Llanos which are worth the price will be the A8 and the A4 dual core ones, as the A6 slower clocked CPU and weaker GPU makes no sense for that difference when you can't just change one of them and you need to change both plus overclocking is limited from what i've read so far in the reviews.

 

[Fourstaff]

Bobcat did well because it had a target (Intel Atom) and did well in the competition which followed. However, I am not too sure about Llano's target (seems to be the budget gamer and your general internet people), and therefore I am not convinced that its going to sell like hotcakes especially that its going to cost about as much as an i3. Dell and system integrators might like it a lot though, they can tout "good" graphics card in a nice cheap package. Somehow I see Llano's success being based around these integrators, not with the enthusiast market as before like Intel SandyBridge and others.

 

[RejZoR]

The only target for this is your budget gamer, richer ones will go for i3+mid end graphics, which is only about $150 more expensive depending on graphics card, and I am quite sure it will be a few miles ahead in the framerate department.

Considering these integrated cores are as good as low to mid end graphic card there is no need to even go into that segment.

 

[Fourstaff]

Considering these integrated cores are as good as low to mid end graphic card there is no need to even go into that segment.

Llano will be another case of "jack of all trades and master of none". If AMD does it right, I think they have a winner here. If not, well, next time then. Despite what I said earlier, after scouring for benchmarks and stuff like that, I am starting to think AMD might have a winner rather than a loser.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a8-3850-llano,2975.html

 

[damric]

I think these would be great in gaming tablets.

 

[zsolt_93]

It seems from the reviews that OC is a real no go for these as the bus speeds are linked and overclocking the PCiE messes up the storage controller. A true competitor for Sandy Bridge at the how to limit overclocking category.

 

[Semi-Lobster]

I hope wizard, if he has the time can do a review of the A6 Radeon HD 6530D and 6550D with hybrid crossfire eventually. It would be interesting to see the results of tests of combining a decent APU and a discrete card compared to the wimpy results of the old hybrid crossfire setups

 

[meirb111]

price is very good since 6570+phenom ii x4 cost more than the A8-3850 135$

 

[zsolt_93]

But A8 is not phenom II it is athlon II so the price is not that good. You could get the Athlon+GPU for the same price from what i've read.

 

[meirb111]

what?

But A8 is not phenom II it is athlon II so the price is not that good. You could get the Athlon+GPU for the same price from what i've read.

1.where would you buy Athlon2+ 6570 at 135$??
2.Athlon 2 has only 2mb cache and is 45nm
3.power of athlon 2 x4 +6570 is more than 100w close to 150w
4. only one fan is needed for this apu -less noise

 

[zsolt_93]

That!

Where is the L3 cache from the APU?
Does a 6550 exist for desktop?
Nobody talked about consumption.
The prices vary between countries and the 6570 is more powerful with dedicated ram so peformance will be better; same with the athlon, the 645 is almost better than A8.
Have you read any articles about this? If not then search for information. Until the review gets done on TPU look at Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, XBit labs and you will find out what i'm saying.

 

[meirb111]

Where is the L3 cache from the APU?
Does a 6550 exist for desktop?
Nobody talked about consumption.
The prices vary between countries and the 6570 is more powerful with dedicated ram so peformance will be better same with the athlon, the 645 is almost better than A8.
Have you read any articles about this? If not then search for information. Until the review gets done on TPU look at Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, XBit labs and you will find out what i'm saying.

since there is no 6550 card yet its close to 6570 with 80 less stream processors
i looked at anda and : "Radeon HD 6570 and an Athlon II X4 640 for $175 vs. a A8-3850 for $135" and they say the apu is 89% compared to 6570 so the a A8-3850 is a winner
and software that will use this apu better may come in the future

 

[Over_Lord]

So dear TPU, where's your REVIEW?

 

[Benetanegia]

I think these would be great in gaming tablets.

You mad? These things consume 125w. That's almost 2 orders of magnitude bigger than a tablet SoC.

 

[Disparia]

Looks good.

Wife's computer is an Athlon II X2 250 with HD5670. Pushes everything she does (LOTRO, Sims) at 1650x1050 rather well for the price. If these chips were out back when I bought the parts, I would have certainly opted for them.

 

[HalfAHertz]

In AT's review they state that the graphic architecture is based on the 5570 not the 6570 meaning no dual scheduler/tessellation tweaks. So it seems weird that they want you to pair it with a 6-series graphics and may explain the poor A-CFx scaling. I guess it's because you can't find the 5500 series in volume sales anymore?

 

[devguy]

In AT's review they state that the graphic architecture is based on the 5570 not the 6570 meaning no dual scheduler/tessellation tweaks. So it seems weird that they want you to pair it with a 6-series graphics and may explain the poor A-CFx scaling. I guess it's because you can't find the 5500 series in volume sales anymore?

While that may be true, they also brought over many tweaks from the HD 6000 series, such as the UVD 3.0 engine.

If you all look at the Guru3D review, it shows the A8 chip doing quite well even at 1920x1080p with some older games on the integrated GPU. HOWEVER, they are using DDR3-1866 @ CL7, and memory bandwidth makes a huge difference on Llano APUs when the iGPU is being utilized. Unfortunately, I believe most PCs for sale with Llano will be using DDR3-1333 @ CL9, and won't have nearly the performance shown in the Guru3D review.

 

[Widjaja]

This will be fine for those odd little Eee mini PCs which are even smaller than an ITX.

 

[rem82]

But A8 is not phenom II it is athlon II so the price is not that good. You could get the Athlon+GPU for the same price from what i've read.

You can see here :

1) New better ΙMC . Imc can overclock rams at 1260Mhz Χ2multi (for DDR3) =2520Mhz !!!

2) Better Overclocking than ATHLON II & PHENOM II , Up to 4,3Ghz on air, WITH IGP O/C at 900Mhz core !

3) IGP 6550D & 6530D can work with discrete ΗD6570 & 6670 in HYBRID CROSSFIRE !!!! With little money you can have gaming pc or gaming HDPC ....

4) IGP 6550D is very good overclocker. 900Mhz core

5) FM1 motherboards have NATIVE USB III support, Native SATA III support & lucid virtu support.

6) The total performance from IGP+ CPU is better than Sandy in the same pecuniary cost !

Apus are the best chips for OEMs (Dell, HP, LENOVO) , for HDPC (MEDIA CENTER), for small GAMING DESKTOPs and for all simple users !!!

 

[HalfAHertz]

Indeed:

From what I gather overclocking is a big problem atm however. The baseCLK frequency of 100 drives both the frequency of the core, the NB, the GPU and the memory controller and all the other little controllers like usb and sata. Multiplier overclocking seems to be broken on most motherboards and only the BaseCLK can be overclocked. But if that wasn't enough it seems you can't go over 120MHz because you break usb and sata support.

Edit: Yes the basic was 1333MHz. 1660 offers a ~12-14% gain and 1833 offers ~20%

 

[rem82]

Indeed:
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/llano/review/desktop/ddr3scaling-percentage.png

with basic frequency of memories in diagram the DDR3 1333Mhz ???