Thursday, June 16, 2011

So what is an APU?

Most PC enthusiasts will have heard of the new AMD Bulldozer CPUs coming out soon. Here is a blog entry about the APU-ready motherboards we are readying for the launch – modeled here by the lovely Annie who works in our RMA team here at GIGABYTE HQ.

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When we first heard that AMD was calling their new HD graphics enabled CPU an APU, there were a number of different ideas for what it could possibly stand for: AMD Processing Unit, All-purpose Processing Unit, Autonomous Processing Unit, and more… However, it soon became apparent that APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit, but yet there still seemed to be a lot of questions about what makes it different to a CPU. Finally, on June 14th AMD officially announced their next generation A-Series APUs in a detailed press release with an accompanying youtube video:

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Essentially, the APU combines a CPU + discrete GPU on a single die, allowing for never seen before DX11 integrated graphics (you can play games that you could normally only play with a reasonable VGA card). It supports AMD Dual Graphics when paired with an AMD Radeon VGA card, and you’ll also experience a performance boost during productivity applications where the GPU can take on some of the work traditionally done by the CPU in PCs with integrated graphics.

Oh yes, apparently the APU overclocks pretty nicely on GIGABYTE motherboards (google this: AMD A-Series APU Smashes IGP Performance Records).

Not much else to say really…

Read the Chinese (中文版) version of this blog here.

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