AMD Introduces A6-3500 Desktop APU

[bustapr]

its not really about the apu being slower than an intel cpu + gpu. Its more about pc manufacturers. In the casual market, people look for simplicity and saving money. The APU is dirt cheap and is low power, and manufacturers are already noticing this and swarming in. The APU can do just fine for the casual user and can support stronger apps like games. and all of this can be done with a tiny pc. If some motherboard makers decide to get rid of the pci-e(no use for casual user)the can make cases even smaller than mini towers. Simple, gets the job done, and saves money on power.

And theyre not that slow either. I have an A4 laptop (the weakest apu) and it runs bioshock and any valve game at high settings with 30fps. the cpu isnt as powerful as a core i3, but the casual user doesnt really notice or care about compression times, decoding, and renderng, and such things like that. it just gets the job done easy.

 

[ta152h]

[citation][nom]GeekApproved[/nom]See AMD's last priority is bulldozer, apparently it's everyone elses priority. AMD is playing the smart game, releasing products that can actually make them money. Bulldozer won't, that's why it's at the bottom of their "release" list.[/citation]

It's certainly less important than Bobcat, but it's not at all clear it won't make money. You have the AMD dorks that try to portray Bulldozer as a real competitor to Sandy Bridge in a broad sense, and it won't be. The design is well known, and it's not intended to compete head on.

Having said that, it's going to offer great price/power/performance for situations where you have a lot of threads (more than the true CPU cores, or modules in AMD talk) and they are using integer. Or, really, where hyper-threading (with regards to integer workloads) is important, AMD will beat hyper-threading. It's not everything, but it's better they are now, and it's not a tiny segment of the workload.

But, what you seem to understand, and most do not, is that Bobcat is a huge game changer. It's a huge market, and it's an extremely attractive product in that segment. The GPU is a bit strong for the CPU though, but otherwise AMD hit a home run, and this product is going to hurt Intel much more than Bulldozer will. But, saying Bulldozer won't make money is taking it too far. It's going to be very attractive for a segment, and AMD can still price low enough where it will work in other segments as well. I think they can make money on it, unless Intel is very aggressive. I know Bobcat is making money, and gaining market share. It should, it's an excellent product.

 

[Belardo]

[citation][nom]sykozis[/nom]AMD uses the "we'll release a new product when we have a new product ready to be released" cycle. They make no attempt what so ever to keep up with Intel's release cycle.[/citation]
Er... no.
AMD doesn't have the deep pockets that Intel has. Ever notice how many AMD TV ads you see vs. Intel? Oh yeah, NONE. Yet AMD has a good chunk of the CPU market.

Also, Intel used illegal business tactics (keeping AMD out of DELL, etc) which reduced their sales. So back in the P4 days, intel was making money out the nose with a big hot slow CPU... advertising its HIGH speed (clocks), etc. While tech people were buying AMDs, but AMD was slowly gaining sales.

Just before Core2 came out, AMD was actually selling very very well. Going into Office supply stores, etc - there were 4 AMD systems to each intel (desktops / not notebooks). The info us techies knew was filtering down to the common users.

Then Core2 came out and knocked AMD down hard... and with Intel Selling the Core2 for a LOW price, they were kicking AMD in the balls, over and over again.

If AMD has more money, making more profit, etc... they can afford more techs to work on technology. If AMD has 500 people working on a CPU design, Intel would have 2000... guess who will finish first?

 

[Guest]

To all the haters: Llano is a MAINSTREAM product, and the best one on the market. It's cheap, it has enough GPU to play almost any game at reasonable settings, and it is very efficient. Capability > Bragging Rights.

Now, you may have been left a little confused by the recent barrage of articles across the web that benchmarked as many 2-cores-or-less applications to show that Intel's dual-core can beat AMD's quad core in things that can't make use of more than 2 cores, however, AMD's quadcore is overkill for 95% of users, and since few max out their CPU for more than a few seconds at a time, we can infer that AMD is: just as good.

Furthermore, AMD has eliminated the bottleneck of GPGPU: Previously, a CPU would have to copy data to the GPU's memory for processing. Now, they're sharing a 500gflop GPU's memory with the CPU, eliminating the need to copy memory back and forth. The revolution is here.

 

[schmich]

[citation][nom]davendork[/nom]A big part of me doesn't want to hear anything else from AMD unless it's, "Hey everybody, here's Bulldozer."[/citation]
Then just wait until the 19th of September.

 

[afrobacon]

[citation][nom]acadia11[/nom]So, did Bulldozer get released yet. Until then, AMD is not allowed to make another announcement, if AMD has cured cancer, invented cold fusion, solved world hunger, and landed a manned mission to Mars they better not announce it unless it involves the words Bulldozer Released.[/citation]

May sweet baby Jesus in his little tuxedo shirt and baby Einstein videos condemn AMD to hell if they don't follow through with this mans words.

 

[silverblue]

Fusion is a very promising idea and even though it'll take Trinity to really show what it can do (and even then... RAM needs to get faster, or we need more RAM channels, to avoid starving either the CPU or the GPU, or both), Llano isn't a bad start. It wasn't made out to be a performance part to begin with, though like Brazos, the GPU side is slightly overkill. We can all want more aggressive turbo or more cache and such like but there's a limit to what you can do with Stars and its aging technology, and what's more, it doesn't benefit AMD to sell super high clocked versions of Llano because they'd be far more expensive and thus right in the firing line of Phenom II/i3 with discrete graphics. Not smart.

Bulldozer may not be meant to compete directly with Sandy Bridge, however with the fact that it's coming to the desktop AND bringing the FX moniker back with it, AMD are doing so anyway. They're looking for a top-to-bottom CPU hierarchy with Bulldozer, Llano and Bobcat, so regardless of whether Bulldozer belongs in the end-user market is irrelevant now.

If Bulldozer fails to light up the end-user market, AMD won't be significantly damaged by it. If it fails in the server market however, this is a big deal. Still, for such a comparatively small company, their desktop market share is still impressive. All the more reason for Fusion to become a success.

 

[IH8U]

I'm looking foreward to dozer, but something is holding me back here. AMD has had serious flops when it comes to big releases (TLB anyone?), then again so has Intel (Piii, P4). AMD's biggest market is still the Servers, but I could see Llano in a laptop (better GFX with a CPU upgrade), or an HTPC. Get me a D@mn uITX board for Llano already!

 

[verbalizer]

OMG.
AMD enough already.
With every mentioning of your name AMD the level of Bulldozer irritation rises and rises.
It damn well better perform after all these delays and stepping revisions.
It doesn't have to beat Sandy Bridge for me but compete with it and be more than the Phenom II class of chips by at least 40%.
Please or face an embarrassing turn of events for yourselves, this is already a marketing nightmare.
And Intel is laughing while they prepare to drop the Ivy bomb..
I have to Intel units and two AMD units, I am upgrading to AM3+ motherboard regardless if I jump on Bulldozer or not.
I'll wait for it to be released then look for actual reports of data..

FYI - this lower clocked nonsense needs to stop, even with a decent GPU system, the low clocks are a turn-off.

 

[silverblue]

Intel also release some low-clocked CPUs, albeit with aggressive turbos (mobile Llano does the same).

Additionally, I'm not sure Intel would be in a hurry to release an improved architecture if there's no competition. With a month to go, I think we'd have been told of another Bulldozer delay by now.