Tuesday, July 19, 2011

AMD to Release Unlocked A8-3870 Llano APU in Q4 2011

AMD come with new technology, increased features, increased clock speed and it will cecome AMD's fastest APU.

In the fourth quarter of this year, AMD is expected to update its A-Series desktop APU series with a chip that is also based on the Llano architecture, but it comes with an unlocked multiplier to allow for higher overclocking.

The new accelerated processing unit will be known as the A8-3870 and thanks to its 3.1GHz base frequency will become AMD's fastest APU, surpassing the current 2.9GHz clocked A8-3850.

Outside of the higher operating clock and unlocked multiplier, both of these chips will feature similar specifications as they sport quad processing cores with 4MB of Level 2 cache memory, an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz controller, and Radeon HD 6550D graphics.

This is AMD's fastest on-die GPU to be included in the Llano APU line and it packs no less than 400 stream processors that are running at 600MHz.

In spite of the increased clock speed, the A8-3870 will carry the same 100W TDP as the A8-3850 and A6-3650 APUs.

Even though the only way to overclock these APUs is to raise their FSB speed, current AMD FM1 motherboards are affected by a bug which falsely supports multipliers over those set by the manufacturer.

Increasing the multiplier for such a chip, results in both the BIOS and other third-party tools (like CPU-Z and HWiNFO) reporting wrong clock speeds, making some believe that the overclock was successful even though performance remains unaltered.

Until the A8-3870 is launched, AMD is expected to release four more A-Series desktop APUs. These will feature a 65W TDP, pack between two and four cores, range in speed between 2.1GHz and 2.7GHz and select models will feature support for AMD's Turbo Core technology.

In addition to the A8-3870, the fourth quarter of 2011 will also mark the introduction of the E2-3200, which will be the least powerful Llano desktop APU to be released by AMD. (via Donanim Haber)