By Claire Reilly
SYDNEY, NSW: The international computer processor manufacturer AMD was appealing to graphics-hungry technophiles earlier this week, launching a new range of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) for notebooks, netbooks and PCs.
Since the launch, a range of computing manufacturers have come out to showcase their newest devices using the chips, including Toshiba, Samsung and Acer.
According to Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of the AMD Products Group, the AMD A-Series APU is set to revolutionise the computing hardware industry.
“It heralds the arrival of brilliant all-new computing experiences, and enables unprecedented graphics and video performance in notebooks and PCs,” he said. “We are bringing discrete-class graphics to the mainstream.
“The AMD A-Series APU represents an inflection point for AMD and is perhaps the industry’s biggest architectural change since the invention of the microprocessor.”
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In a demonstration of the new processors, AMD boasted that they enabled “brilliant HD graphics, supercomputer-like performance and over 10.5 hours of battery life,” as well as offering increased frame rates for gaming and the ability to run multiple lag-free videos and graphics-heavy programs at once.
In order to provide these benefits, the A-Series APUs “combine up to four x86 CPU cores with powerful DirectX11-capable discrete-level graphics and up to 400 Radeon cores along with dedicated HD video processing on a single chip.”
Bob Grim, AMD’s director of worldwide product marketing, said that he was “very excited” about the new processors.
“The AMD APU offers up to an 80 per cent improvement for gaming, with brilliant HD graphics,” he said. “And we have more OEM partners, retail partners and channel distribution than we’ve ever had before.”
Since the AMD launch, those OEM partners have announced the arrival of their own notebooks to capitalise on the new technology.
Toshiba will launch three new Satellite L750D notebooks in August, Samsung has announced the addition of the 300V and 305V models to its Series 3 Notebook range, also due in August, and Acer’s Aspire 5560 series was launched this month.
