AMD A6 3500 APU review - Introduction

Introduction

AMD's consumer targeted APUs have been released with good success. The biggest success is that they found their way into notebooks, but even in the desktop segment they work out quite well. The APU yes, silicon that holds both an GPU and CPU harbored inside that APU -- Fusion.

Now before we start of this article let's be clear here, we are talking about entry level to mid-range targeted processors (well -- APUs). So we are looking at reasonable up-to okay CPU performance versus a rather kick ass integrated GPU, and all that for very interesting prices.

We look at entry level hardware, for a great deal you get some processor power and actually quite some decent GPU power all harbored inside that processor. We'll go even weirder though, as today we'll be testing a triple core APU, yes that is an APU with three physical CPU cores activated, instead of the four you expected.

This three CPU cores product was actually announced back in August already but now finally seems to be available in good volume in the stores, at the nice price of only 70 EUR (here in the Netherlands).

The AMD A6-3500 APU is rated at 65W power consumption and is running at 2.1 GHz, AMD's Turbo Core is supported so you can see clocks of up to 2.4GHz depending on the workload. These Socket FM1 APUs have a 3MB L2 cache and still pack 320 Radeon (shader) cores with that embedded GPU running at 443 MHz with what AMD calls a Radeon HD 6530.

Though not the cool 400 shader cores the A8 series has, it remains a leap in performance for integrated graphics alright.

So before we dive a little deeper into the performance of the processor, as always, I wanted to quickly talk about the APU and the technology behind it. Next page please.