APU Models and our A8-3850

At launch we should see four A-Series desktop APUs launch; within that we've got two Radeon based GPU solutions on offer with the A8-3850 and A8-3800 both offering HD 6550 level graphics, and the A6-3650 and A6-3600 both offering HD 6530 level graphics. As far as features go, both models offer us DirectX 11 support and UVD support which you saw back on the previous page.

It's these two features that make AMD stand out from other companies who have integrated platforms. With what AMD are offering here, we should be able to do so much more than just cruise the internet and write emails, hence the appeal to the Llano platform over both the Brazos one and the competitions low powered systems.

When it comes to similarities between all the models, we can see they all are in the new FM1 package, carry four cores, support 1866MHz DDR of DDR3 in Dual Channel form and offer us 4MB of L1 Cache. This compares to the Brazos platform E-350 which was only dual core and offered us HD 6310 level graphics.

Out of the four models, we've also got two different power ratings; the models ending in 00 are only 65w TDP while the ones ending in 50 are 100w TDP. This isn't related to the GPU power on offer as both the A8-3800 which offers the HD 6550 and A6-3600 which offers the HD 6530 both offer us 65w TDP. Instead it's in relation to the clock speed and the integration of AMD Turbo Core.

Clocks range from 2.1GHz to 2.9GHz. What will most likely be the deciding factor in which APU you buy, though, will be the kind of GPU power you're after. Once you've decided what you want there, then the decision comes to if you want the lower powered, lower clocked "00" model or the higher clocked, more power hungry "50" model.

Looking above, you can see the graphics that is embedded into each individual A-Series APU. The A8 as we mentioned carries the HD 6550D; that offers 400 Cores, 20 Texture Units, 480 GFLOPS of GPU Peak Compute and a clock speed of 600MHz. The A6 on the other hand offers the HD 6530D and carries 320 Cores, 16 Texture Units, 284 GFLOPS of GPU Peak Compute and a stock clock speed of 443MHz.

As for the model we're dealing with, AMD has sent us the A8-3850 APU. This is currently the top A-Series APU model coming in at 2.9GHz and utilizing the HD 6550D for Graphics. The overall physical design of the CPU doesn't really bring anything new to the table with the same Pin Grid (PGA) being used over the Land Grid (LGA) that Intel use. As for the number of pins, the new FM1 socket has a total of 937; this is a whole one pin less than the Phenom II which carries 938.