The APU — Finally, Power and Price Can See Eye-To-Eye!

Alright, another blog post with a good break between the last — I do apologise, my life has been in a rather hectic phase but that should be coming to a close. I’ve found myself half way across the world, back in the US of A. I was out in Phoenix for a couple of weeks and now I find myself in a quaint little house in north LA.

Firstly, I’d like to start by defining what an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) really is, however I will only be talking about a certain type, the AMD Fusion which has thus far been the most market successful. I often like to compare it to a human brain in the way it performs, one part of it handling central processing, and left brain functionality such as logic. The other handling graphics processing, like the right brain. In the past you would have a separate video card and CPU but with the introduction of the APU you get both in one.

Now you might think at first that having two in one detracts from the power of one or the other but  you get a good amount of power for the price you pay for it. For example, the laptop I recently purchased. An HP Pavillion g6 series cost me ~$415 USD and it is capable of running games like Battlefield 3 and Fallout: New Vegas at medium to medium-high graphics. Which was a big shocker for me given the price tag.

Now, the A6 series APU my computer is currently running is the A6-3420M, upper-mid range of the APU processors from AMD. The APU’s integrated graphics processor is an AMD Radeon HD 6520G with 2GB of on-board video memory. Some time this year the A10 is set to launch which will provide a big power boost to the current series of AMD Fusion processors as it is meant to be running on Radeon’s new 7000 series graphics processing capabilities. In addition to the added graphics processing capabilities it is rumoured that the new A10 will be receiving a 20-30% boost in overall general processing capabilities.

Keeping all that in mind and you are operating on a budget but need to build a new computer on short-notice you can Crossfire video cards of the same GPU series as the APU to get extended graphics performance at a very affordable price.