AMD has officially rolled out its first two A-series desktop APUs and PCWizKid has the A8-3850 from AMD for a closer look.The CPU portion of the APU consists of four tweaked Stars cores. There is no L3 cache, but AMD increased the L2 cache size to 1MB per core instead. Add some other minor improvements and you squeeze 6% more performance out of what is, frankly, an aging microarchitecture that dates all the way back to 2003. Performance should be similar to a Athlon II x4.
AMD A-Series APU Comparison
A8-3850
A8-3800
A6-3650
A6-3600
CPU Cores
4
CPU Clock
2.9GHz
2.4GHz
2.6GHz
2.1GHz
Turbo Core
No
2.7GHz
No
2.4GHz
L2 Cache
4MB (1MB/core)
GPU
HD 6550D
HD 6530D
TDP
100W
65W
100W
65W
Price
US$139.99
N/A
US$119.99
N/A
AMD has four A-series APUs lined up, but only the A8-3850 and A6-3650 are currently priced and available. Both models are rated for 100W TDP and do not support Turbo Core. The A8-3850's CPU is clocked at a rather modest 2.9GHz, which is not surprising since there is also an onboard GPU to take into account. Turbo Core will only be used on the A8-3800 and A6-3600 to maximize single-threaded performance while still keeping within a 65W TDP.
The A8-3850 reviewed today by PCWizKid is the next generation entry level mainstream desktop CPU, it supports dual-channel memory at up to DDR3-1866 speed which is faster than Sandy Bridge's (official) DDR3-1333 support. AMD has positioned the A series to compete with the Intel core i3 and lower end i5's for example. The A8 and A6 series also differentiates itself from the Intel Core i3 with its more powerful integrated GPU.
Llano's GPU uses AMD's older VLIW5 (Cypress) architecture rather than the latest VLIW4 (Cayman) architecture. Codenamed Sumo, it is derived from last year's 400-SP Redwood core found on the HD 5670 and HD 5570.
On A8-series APUs, the 6550D will be clocked at 600MHz. On A6-series APUs, the 6530D will be clocked at 443MHz and have one SIMD disabled, leaving us with 320 SPs.
AMD GPU Comparison
HD 6550D
HD 6530D
HD 5570
HD 6570
Stream Processors
400
320
400
480
Texture Units
20
16
20
24
ROPs
8
8
8
8
GPU Clock
600MHz
443MHz
650MHz
650MHz
Memory Type
DDR3
GDDR5/DDR3
GDDR5
Memory Clock
Up to 933MHz
1000MHZ/900MHz
1000MHz
Memory Bus
128-bit shared
128-bit
128-bit
Up to 512MB of system memory can be allocated to the GPU. The GPU accesses this dedicated memory via the Radeon Memory Bus. In addition to this, there is also a Fusion Compute Link which is used by the GPU to access shared system memory.
Video Review
Conclusion
The AMD A8 3850 APU PCWizKid reviewed offers a very affordable alternative to the Intel Core i3 and i5. The A8 APU with the combination of the Asus A75 based motherboard used in our testing gave both a processor, graphics subsystem, SATA-600 ports, USB 3.0 for a latest and greatest entry level PC build. Long gone are the days of not being able to play the latest games on a integrated GPU on board. This latest generation brings us enough performance to run latest directx11 game titles on medium settings. Dispite being a locked processor, overclocking of the bus proved to give an additional boost of performance to 3.5Ghz.
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