No, for APUs, multiple channels make a significant performance difference. RAM frequency is important too, but single channel takes a big performance hit for APUs.

I'm now not sure about the single vs. dual, channel thing. Some people say it makes very little difference and others are saying the difference is dramatic and also benefits Intel HD graphics. I will agree though that the laptop makers should use motherboards that support dual channel since the APU's are fully capable of using it.

I'm now not sure about the single vs. dual, channel thing. Some people say it makes very little difference and others are saying the difference is dramatic and also benefits Intel HD graphics. I will agree though that the laptop makers should use motherboards that support dual channel since the APU's are fully capable of using it.

Easy way to look at it: For AMD and Intel CPUs, dual channel makes very little difference. Plain CPUs also run best with a proper balance between latency and frequency. For Intels with active IGPs, dual channel makes a subtle difference. Intel IGPs do run better with higher RAM frequencies, but not much. For AMD APUs, dual channel can yield as much as a 25-30% performance increase, depending on what source/test you're looking at. APUs have an almost perfectly linear performance increase with RAM frequency, for just about any GPU test. Of course, there will always be some tests that don't seem to care about multiple channels at all, but APUs will almost certainly at some point take advantage of 2 channels.

I have always wondered whether my first gen Llano APU laptop was running in dual channel or not. HP claimed it did even though one RAM card is 2gb and the other one is 4. Some reporting utilities show that it is dual channel and others say it isn't. It always has done very well in gaming for what it is and it was my main rig for about 4 years, playing things like Dirt3, Warcraft, Rift, LOTRO, Skyrim, Crysis 2, Far Cry up to 3, all the Half Life games, Portal, TF2, and even Tomb Raider without problems. Of course I ran at medium to low settings and framerates were rarely 60 but they did stay above 30 reliably in all those games. It's an A8-3500M with HD6620G graphics. These new APU's look great but I hope they don't suffer from the same issues as the latest ones. The Kaveri chips actually run better than the newer models because they don't throttle down nearly as much under load. AMD, just like Intel, went for power efficiency over performance in their latest mobile chips.