AMD launches A300 and A320 FirePro APUs

AMD have topped off a busy few days in the workstation market with the addition of a pair of FirePro based APUs. Essentially “Trinity” for WorkStations, the A300 and A320 APUs are quad core CPUs based off Piledriver and feature integrated FirePro class graphics.

The A300 comes with a 65W TDP, four cores @ 3.4GHz stock/ 4GHz Turbo, 384 FirePro cores @ 760MHz and has a locked multiplier.

The A320 comes with a 100W TDP, four cores @ 3.8GHz stock/ 4.2GHz Turbo, 384 FirePro cores @ 800MHz and has an unlocked multiplier.

Availability is immediate, but pricing is unknown. Speculation suggests a $400 price point for the A320 APU. We expect both APUs will be based off the FM2 socket, and utilise the A85 chipset. Both APUs pack a lot of features:

• Support for AMD Eyefinity Technology
• AMD Turbo Core technology
• Support for horizontal display resolutions up to 10,240 x 1600 pixels
• Support for Discrete Compute Offload (DCO), allowing additional compute capability by using discrete AMD FirePro GPUs in parallel with APU graphics for extended GPGPU performance;
• 30-bit color support  for advanced workflows such as color correction and image processing when using displays capable of 10-bit-per-channel operation;
• Dedicated UVD (universal video decoder/VCE, or video CODEC engine) media encoding hardware for faster “fixed function” GPU processing of H.264/MPEG4 files and other motion media formats when using compatible software, to free up CPU resources for other tasks

AMD claims the new FirePro A320 has graphics that beat Intel P4000 workstation Integrated graphics. Although the tests tend to skim over CPU performance indicators, suggesting the Intel part is superior.

Source: Press Release