AMD Unveils Elite A-Series APUs With Enhanced Performance, Improved Efficiency 102
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."
On-die thermal sensors (Score:3, Insightful)
That qualifies as one of those inventions that make you wonder why it had to be invented... The utility is quite obvious.
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AAAHHH, they let the magic smoke out of the AMD! Of course it stopped working! UNFAIR TEST! ~
Re:On-die thermal sensors (Score:4, Informative)
That was 2001, not 2006.
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It was also a result of overclocking the CPU to all unholy hell and wasn't possible to achieve under normal operating conditions, even while yanking the heat sink off. You would damage the processor by yanking the heat sink yes, but it wouldn't smoke more than a very small amount or in any way explode.
The thermal sensor was not included on-die as it was included in the heat sinks of the time for cooling report purposes and was not seen as necessary... which it wasn't.
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Thats actually one of the things I've always liked about AMD and ATI. They both tend to not fuck around about failing. If its dead, its dead, none of this half way bull.
Just finished replacing a 560ti from nvidia with a spare 6870 I had kicking around... should be around the same speed except the 6870 was actually twice as fast due to some issue or other that had cropped up in the nvidia card but thanks to it not failing properly it just hung on and made the computer owner think he had a pile of viruses and
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Thats actually one of the things I've always liked about AMD and ATI. They both tend to not fuck around about failing. If its dead, its dead, none of this half way bull.
Except that an overheated CPU tends to damage the mainboard as well. With a temperature regulated CPU, this doesn't happen. Besides, if the *fan* breaks, I just want to have to replace that fan, not fan+CPU+mainboard.
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Add a diagnostic program to show the temperature/throttling state of the CPU and you have the best of both worlds ;-)
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A steadily overheating CPU is more likely to blow the main board than one that overheated badly once and fried. Have had overheating CPUs go through two mobos before the real problem was identified and the CPU was replaced.
I have the same issue with video cards, though the extreme heat that some holder high end ATI cards were designed to run at caused the problem without the card ever even batting an eyelash. Bled heat into the mainboard and eventually the mobo died after a month or so.
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My last ATI GPU-based-card gave intermittent errors, would flake out in some games but not others, etc. The plural of anecdotal data is meaningless rambling.
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The cooling in the nodes would periodically fail but they'd keep going, just really slowly.
That's actually quite amusing (from the outside). I imagine it had you scratching your head for a while.
I do support the lack of sudden death though. I've rescued a few machines which were "really crap" and never worked properly. The first was a Dell laptop which was shipped without a heatsink! It would run fast for a minute, then really slowly and randomly switch off when it got too hot. Another was a Core 2 desktop
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More to the point, they are still playing catch up with Intel by essentially implementing their own version of the latter's Turbo Boost.
Re:On-die thermal sensors (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If you can figure out how AMD can do that with a fraction of the budget and no in-house fab, I do believe they would have a job for you as CFO.
whats the spec benchmark ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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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 ? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [notebookcheck.net]
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
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What the fuck did he lose? This is a discussion forum, not a game.
Re:AMD even still relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in single-threaded tasks. You get into multi-threaded and AMD begins to win outright.
Re:AMD even still relevant? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Vast majority of the games do not even tax dual cores all that heavily, and quad cores are a massive overkill for all but a small handful of games. The optimizations a la BF3 are just unnecessary because most games have processes that just don't run well in parallel. And even BF3 doesn't scale all that well as cores increase past 4. Yours is a fringe case where you perform exactly one task on the fly that actually scales on more then a couple of CPU cores efficiently (video encoding). So his claim of "real
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Re:AMD even still relevant? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I can testify that this is simply bullshit (as in a bold-faced lie). I have E-450 notebook sitting 2 meters away from me as of typing this, and CPU is so weak, I routinely observe it max itself out doing many mundane everyday tasks. Even browsing the web has noticeable hiccups on page loads that I do not see on this core i5 desktop where openhardwaremonitor shows both cores spike to and sit at 100% usage for a while as page is processed.
I had similar issues with anything from libreoffice calc to even softwa
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"I can testify that this is simply bullshit (as in a bold-faced lie)."
No. It was rhetoric. The grand parent picked the E-450 as an example. While it was admittedly a poor example, he/she did not mean for you to take this as a literal description of the E-450's prowess.
The point, which you missed, was that you don't need either a Core i5 or an AMD Bulldozer to surf the web and write documents. This point is true regardless of the poor choice of example. For the vast majority of software out there a $60 cpu w
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But that's the point why people like myself buy the low end APUs. Discreet video card means it won't run for long off battery while actually running games. APUs like E-450 enjoy long battery life while actually running games.
Also, E-450 cannot decode realtime 1080p h264 high profile video on CPU without a lot of dropped frames. Not enough computing power. It can usually handle 720p unless it's Hi10P in software, in which case it may lag depending on video content (CPU will be taxed from about 80% and up wit
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The grand parent (you) picked E-350, which is the same hardware as E-450 but runs on lower clock speed. You then proceeded to tell open lies about CPU performance. I debunked them as I happen to actually own the overclocked version of the CPU you used in your example, and my experiences with the system over the last year show all if your bullshit as being just that - bullshit.
E-450 is a great choice if you want to play games on battery for a while, because it has a great integrated GPU. For energy it consum
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Have you considered adblock and flashblock?
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Have you considered reading what you're replying to before going into knee-jerk "oh my god, he criticised the company I love" rant after reading the first sentence? I clearly stated in the third paragraph as to why I did not get intel for that notebook.
P.S. E-450 chokes even on slashdot WITH "no ads" option ticked. Looking at >10 second pageloads as a norm on longer posts on firefox. Both cores going at 100% during load. Desktop first gen i5 load times are barely noticeable and are mostly about network -
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I can also testify that my mothers first gen atom chokes on web, but to a much lesser degree (about half less or so). I do not have experience with newer ones, but that atom was one generation before E-450 and of a lower clock rate.
Finally, you may wish to re-read the thread. There were people claiming that:
1. Modern CPUs are fast enough for all mundane everyday software to work smoothly even on slowest ones.
2. E-350 has a good CPU.
Both claims are false, which is what I was addressing. It would seriously su
Re:AMD even still relevant? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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In Crysis 3, the AMDs look good:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Crysis-3-PC-235317/Tests/Crysis-3-Test-CPU-Benchmark-1056578/ [pcgameshardware.de]
Only the really expensive Core i7-3960x (800 Euros or more on my side of the Atlantic) beats the FX-8350. And with a TDP of 130W, it is similar to the FX in heating your PC.
Other games are already moving towards being designed for more parallel processing. For instance X:Rebirth by Egosoft, currently in development. The CEO said in an interview that a quad core is recommended, they will
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The vast majority of game servers and basically every bit of internet infrastructure run by a company with more than 100 employees is virtualized, and those that arent can still use the extra horsepower. Whether or not apache is running as a VM, Im sure it can use more cores.
You fail to realize that end users and their processor usage is pretty tiny compared with the server-side that you never see.
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I care about as much about server performance when on my home machine as server admin cares about home machine performance when configuring his newest blade rack to do whatever it is they will be doing. Why should it be any different? We were talking about home machine use here, are you perhaps posting in the wrong thread?
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Agreed. Example: when I build a rootfs using OpenEmbedded, parallelism is absolutely essential, because it builds thousands of packages. And to let it build in parallel efficiently, you need all these cores (of course), plus fast I/O so it does not become a bottleneck, and lots of RAM to avoid using swap and have a large disk cache. So, for a build server, I'd go with 4 to 8 cores, 16 GB RAM (you can get that for 100 bucks these days), a 7200RPM hard disk for package downloads and archives, and an SSD for t
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You miss the bigger picture. What do you suppose youtube runs on? You think theyre using physical servers?
How many threads do you suppose the physical boxes behind the youtube clusters are running?
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VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft would like a word with you.
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I bought an amd for my recent file server build. 120$ for chip + mobo (and integrated graphics, who needs a video card?). 35 watt tdp, and most of it's time is spent idling away.
I could have gone Intel - don't get me wrong, but a decent motherboard with all the features of the AMD I bought runs closer to 150 by itself.
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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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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paralyzable
Capable of halting the processor?
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Well, that's the thing.
If you're in the 4 socket space (40 cores intel IIRC, 64 cores AMD), then you're probably in the market for something pretty parallelizable. Which means of course that AMD doesn't reallt have the disadvantage.
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The problem is that Intel only has a marginal advantage, and AMDs chipsets is more than strong enough on the top of that. If AMDs chipsets where underpowered, sure your advice would be sane. Also as others point out, it only applies to single threads.
Re:AMD even still relevant? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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This x1000.
In 2010 I bought an AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition and a motherboard I could afford. I ran it as a quad core (unlocked cores) at 3.3ghz until that motherboard died. The only one I could get in a pinch did not have a southbridge that would unlock my other cores. I still ran it at 3.4ghz without issue.
Fast forward to 2013 and I just bought a new motherboard with DDR3 ram (8gb of it, double the 4 I had before) and unlocked my cores again. Its like a new computer.
I took the old mobo and ram and b
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I built my AMD PC ages ago, you insensitive clod! An intel motherboard with the same feature set cost literally twice as much, so that was a big help deciding. And the availability of much more powerful CPUs in the same socket cemented the deal. I spent $100 each on MB and CPU. Some time later I spent another $100 and got a CPU with twice as many cores at the same clock rate without having to change anything, just dropped it in.
Also, quad core? Only four cores? I mean, I started out with three, but today th
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you should be glad people buy amd chips anymore, its the only true competition for Intel.
I buy AMD because well...fuck Intel.
In all honesty the performance different is negligible anymore, but ive had my quad core amd for awhile, its sturdy, it does what i need and i can overclock it....I have never been disappointed in a AMD cpu, intel however...i had a few shitty ones from them. I wont buy ATI however, i hate those video cards.
so just be thankful that the market is what it is, if intel had a monopoly you
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so just be thankful that the market is what it is, if intel had a monopoly you would be paying alot more for a shittier cpu.
But Intel CPUs are cheaper today than they were when AMDs were objectively better in the Pentium-4 space heater era.
AMD isn't their major competitor, ARM is.
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Because why would you support their dishonesty when they pull shenanigans like intentionally crippling run-time performance of their code when run on non Intel hardware??
http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 [agner.org]
And of course they put the disclaimer as a "gif" so text engines won't find it.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimization-notice/#opt-en [intel.com]
When Intel learns to respect their customers then I'll respect and support them.
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Their top of the line quad core barely keeps up against the mid range i5 chips.
For the cost of that mid-range i5, you can get an FX-8350 that will completely spank the fuck out of it.
Now stop being an irrational intel fanboy that ignores price.
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Because their way cheaper. Especially for mid-range and even mid-high range. The price difference is also more noticable in less developed countries.
In my case, Intel does offers better CPUs than my current AMD one, but they're all out of my budget.
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Make Mine A Double! (Score:2)
So, 4 cores at 2.5-3.5GHz, 384 shaders, and dual-channel DDR3-1866 RAM at 35W.
If AMD were to double everything they'd have a really nice 70W desktop chip. Not sure what the die size is for Richland, so a doubled chip might not be cost-effective - though the PS4 APU has 8 cores and 1152 shaders, so it's at least possible.
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No harder to do than any other multi-package server board.
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Socket 2011 has quad-channel memory off one die, and AMD's G34 server socket has quad-channel off two. Again, it's definitely possible.
With 768 shaders off just dual-channel DDR3 you'd be seriously bandwidth-starved, so I don't see it working well without four memory channels.
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Since we're talking a midrange (relatively cheap) product here, a huge socket like the 2011 might be prohibitive in terms of cost.
So what about a PC mainboard in PS4 style, with 8GByte GDDR5 RAM?
CPU and RAM might have to be soldered in, but it would solve the bandwidth problem and 8GByte RAM seem adequate for most things you would do on a midrange PC...
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If AMD were to double everything they'd have a really nice 70W desktop chip.
Or if you were to just buy a Phenom II X6 and a real GPU (preferably not from AMD) then you'd have a much better desktop system. APUs are for portables and nettops.
Skip the TLAs please (Score:2)
35W ?? (Score:2)
35 watts? Really? I have an AMD APU in my HTPC and it pulls 130W. They managed to drop it by over 100?
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They're releasing the laptop chips first.
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Ahhh. OK I missed that part. I would love to use a lower power part in my HTPC (would have prefered the slightly more powerful, yet 100W 2nd gen model of APU, but they were out of stock, so I took what I could get at the time, which was the first generation of em)
"APU"? Seriously? (Score:1)
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This isn't a troll, it's a joke...
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