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.
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.
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: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.