AMD Shows New A-Series Notebook APUs

Yesterday AMD quietly introduced seven new accelerated A-Series notebook APU's, featuring quad and dual-core designs.

Four out of the seven CPUs introduced by AMD are from the A8 and A6 series which means that they include four processing cores, while the remaining three are A4 chips with dual computing cores.

The fastest of these quad-core models is the A8-3550MX which compared to its predecessor got 100MHz higher base and Turbo Core speeds, making it the first Llano mobile processors to reach the 2GHz frequency (2.7GHz in Turbo mode).
 
However, the specs of the graphics core were left unaltered and the chip sports the same Radeon HD 6620G integrated GPU which operated at 444MHz.

The remaining APUs launched by AMD also take a similar approach and just increase their base and Turbo frequencies with 100MHz over those of their predecessors, while the rest of the specs are left unaltered.

As Hardcore Hardware reports, the only exception to this rule is the entry-level A4-3305M, which works at the same frequencies as the previous A4-3300M, but now gets a new graphics core and a smaller amount of cache memory (1MB vs 2MB in the A4-3300M).

The new GPU is actually less powerful than the one in the A4-3300M as it comes with just 160 shader processors in comparison with the 240 shaders installed in the previous model, but received a higher operating frequency (593MHz vs 444MHz) to make up for this setback.

No info regarding pricing was made public by AMD, but the new Llano chips are expected to start making their way into laptops by the end of this year.