A8 and A6, four debuting APU

Today four APU for the desktop segment, two A6 and two A8, are introduced. Each APU is also marketed under two different TDP: 100W and 65W, the first with higer, but fixed, CPU operating frequencies, and the second with lower frequencies but that can be increased through TurboCore 2.0 technology. A8 and A6 are both equipped with 4 cores: the different numbers refers to an increased number of stream processors, 400 for the A8, compared with 320 of the A6. All APUs have 4MB of L2 cache, support 1866 MHz DDR3 memory and can be installed on platforms with FM1 Socket.

By analyzing in detail the two HD 6550D and HD 6530D GPU, respectively integrated in the A8 and in the A6, we note first of all the different number of active SIMD, 5 for the first and 4 for the second. Since each SIMD has 80 stream processors, organized with VLIW-5 architecture, the total number of stream processors is 400 for the HD 6550D and 320 for the HD 6530D. With 4 texture units per SIMD varies of course also their total number in the two GPUs, 20 and 16, respectively. In the A6 the working frequency was also reduced, from 600MHz to 443MHz. Overall, this results in a significant reduction of computational power of the GPU, which is almost halved. The number of ROPs remains unchanged and is equal to 8 for both GPUs.