AMD Introduces Triple-Core A6-3500 APU

25 Comments

View All Comments

• JHBoricua - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

  Actually, it's more of a Phenom II core for all intents and purposes, not an Athlon II.

• silverblue - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

  http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/85?vs=403
  
  Closest comparison I can find, really. You can see that Llano does improve in some areas, however in the absence of knowing the system specs, who's to say some of that isn't down to the Radeon cores?

• Taft12 - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

  Phenom? But there's no L3 cache on a Llano.
  
  Here's the bit where Anand figures Athlon II and Llano are quite in line:
  
  http://www.anandtech.com/show/4476/amd-a83850-revi...
  
  Although AMD has tweaked the A8's cores, the 2.9GHz 3850 performs a lot like a 3.1GHz Athlon II X4. You are getting more performance at a lower clock frequency, but not a lot more.

• zebrax2 - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

  Adding more shader power won't improve the gaming performance as it would be severely bandwidth starved. The current CPUs are already slightly bottlenecked by it

• Arnulf - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

  While this has been suggested before I don't recall seeing 3850 vs. 3650 comparison at same CPU and GPU clockspeed. I know it is possible to lower the CPU multiplier in order to match the CPU portions of the respective chips but I'm not sure whether it's possible to downclock GPU portion of 3850 as well to make it a fair comparison - with nothing but the number of GPU units changed.
  
  This would prove conclusively whether adding more grunt to the GPU portion would be worthwhile.

• Taft12 - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

  The dual-cores are coming, their model names will be A4 as opposed to the A8 and A6 that are already out.
  
  It would be cool to see them bump the CPU clockspeed and pair them with the top integrated GPU (6550D) that's in the A8's. Probably keep the TDP at 65W with only 2 cores.
  
  That would be an awesome product (especially at $75 or less) but I think what we're going to get is an even lesser performing GPU than what is in the current models.

• silverblue - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

  It'll be a shame. As said before, a dual core is still powerful enough to run a mid-range graphics card, and Llano's 6xxx series part isn't far off that definition.
  
  A fully clocked 6550D APU along with two CPU cores at 3GHz with a 3.7GHz turbo would be rather nice. Turbo on the 6550D would be even better. ;) However, AMD wouldn't want to render their quad cores worthless.

• BSMonitor - Thursday, August 18, 2011 - link

  Exactly, they are just following along with the old model of releasing these things. AMD talks about APU, but the classification of these things starts with CPU performance first.
  
  If you want integrated gaming performance, 4 CPUs isn't really helpful. But more shaders, higher clocked GPU would be.
  
  There should be at least one model with mind blowing GPU and it could easily come at the expense of removing a couple CPU cores.

• silverblue - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

  ...however, I suppose we'll get to see what benefit a fourth core can provide for Llano. Having said that, it's not difficult to test by disabling the fourth core on an A8.
  
  A triple-core CPU with discrete-level graphics for under $100 is rather nice, whichever way you look at it. Would it be easy to unlock or overclock, I wonder?

• Taft12 - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - link

  Just look at existing benchmarks comparing Athlon II X4 vs Athlon II X3.
  
  The CPUs in Llano are essentially the same. Anand proved this in the initial A8-3850 review comparing it to the Athlon II X4 at the same clockspeed and getting basically the same benchmark results