KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
There are two key parts of a Lynx system, the APU and the Fusion Controller Hub (FCH). The FCH is essentially a southbridge which handles all the I/O connectivity of the system. There are two models available, the A75 and A55 which have different connectivity options. The A75 is the one we will be testing today which supports SATA 3.0 (6 GB/s) and up to four USB3.0 ports.
Today's release includes four different APU models, two A6 and two A8 models which are all quad core. AMD will be releasing the A4 series and E2 series dual core APUs at some point in the future. In the A6 and A8 ranges there are both a 65W model and a 100W model. The 65W model has a new feature called Turbo Core which lets the CPU cores and Radeon Cores to dynamically enter turbo mode to help maximise performance while staying within the thermal limits. We have the top-end A8-3850 APU for testing today which features the Radeon HD 6550D GPU alongside the four CPU cores. The Radeon HD 6550D features 400 cores and has a clock speed of 600 MHz.
Even though the A8-3850 is a new chip, there is nothing revolutionary about it's architecture. The CPU cores have very similar architecture to the current Phenom II X4 chips, with a few alterations here and there. This includes shrinking the manufacturing process to 32nm and ditching the L3 cache to make room for all four cores on the chip. They have doubled the amount of L2 cache to 1 MB per core, though, to help make up for this.
All four of the APUs support dual high definition displays without having to add a discrete graphics card. They also feature AMDs third generation universal video decoder (UVD3) which provides hardware decoding support for various formats including H.264, MPEG2, DivX and Adobe Flash.
The APU itself looks very similar to the current range of Athlon II and Phenom II CPUs, although the pin layout is different and it uses a different socket (FM1). The AMD Vision A8-3850 APU has a CPU clock speed of 2.9 GHz which is achieved using an APU frequency of 100 MHz and a multiplier of 29x.
Seems brilliant for a high end media center. wouldnt even need a discrete card in most cases.
Interesting idea to watercool it…….. wonder how far the hardcore overclockers will get it.
A low end video card would work wonders in that system the way it can be combined. would have liked to see a few more discrete cards in the line up for curiousity.
I think that Asus board will sell very well, depending on the price. seems pretty loaded if they can get it out around the £100 pp.
ATI are really saving AMd lately. GPU power FTW.
quad core really does help. are there plans for a 6 core version at some stage? with their power saving techniques, it could be really efficient at idle then have some serious power when needed.
Power consumption is great. I think you might actually be able to get away without a discrete card with this, for a while anyway. If you wanted to game at 1080p and maybe only drop some settings.
Direct X 11 titles might prove too much, but its a hell of an improvement. hopefully we start seeing these in laptops. and battery life should still be good.
People also underestimate the importance of the GPU, which is growing significantly more key as the operating systems develop. the GPU will at some stage handle a huge portion of windows rendering tasks. AMD are miles ahead of intel in this regard, thanks to buying ATI. Intel need to buy nvidia. what do they do instead? buy mcafee.
madness.
I’ve already added this one to my ever growing wishlist. Lovely review, btw.
Need the whole system price to really be sure, but looking good so far
@Lee: Couldn’t agree more, low price on one component is not enough.
I recently built my sister a Llano based system, it was the A6-3650 version though, Gigabyte motherboard, 4gb Ram a 500gb HD, DVD writer, 19inch flat panel monitor a case with 450w PSU and keyboard/ mouse…£320 including delivery from Aria.
Installed Black Ops on it, and it played OK, at 1366 * 768 resolution with no AA. Would maybe need to knock off one or two other settings to get it playing perfectly. Windows scored the system a 4.5, but oddly that was down to Windows own 2d performance, everything else was around 5.9 (HD) up to 6.4 (3d gfx) (processor got a 6.1
All in all for the price I was impressed with it. For a do a bit of this and a bit of that computer, which wouldn’t really be used for 3D and video editing these systemsa re great. (without monitor / keyboard / mouse it was only about £230!)