70 dollar APUs announced by AMD

AMD has today announced the availability of two new A4 accelerated processing units. The A4 is the lowest performance of the APU range with A8 being the best and A6 somewhere in between A4 and A8. Both these new A4s will be based off two K10 Husky 32nm cores and 160 “Evergreen” 40nm Radeon graphics stream processors. These APUs offer amazing functionality for the price. Lets take a brief look at what each model offers:

• The A4-3300 APU will bring two cores clocked at 2.5GHz with 1MB of L2 cache. The graphics will be 160 cores at 444MHz. This will all run off a TDP of 65W with a recommended retail price of just $70 (about £50 or €55).
• The A4-3400 APU is the faster variant so you get identical hardware with different clock speeds. 2.7GHz on the CPU and 600MHz on the graphics part. This one will cost just $5 more at £75.

Although these two new APUs will probably struggle to provide the gaming capabilties of their A8 and A6 siblings they will certainly be able to handle any time of video decoding and definitely some light gaming which can be done in DX11 since the onboard Radeon is DX11 compliant. If the other APUs are anything to go by users should have no trouble bringing the A4-3300 to the A4-3400 with some overclocking and bringing the A4-3400 up to about 3GHz and 700MHz should also be no trouble at all (overclocking capabilities will vary chip by chip as always). However, these APUs are not aimed at enthusiasts and overclockers, they are aimed at providing a decent integrated package to the mainstream market and at just $70 and $75 respectively they will do exactly that.

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