AMD has just announced its AM1 Kabini APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) series consisting of the Athlon and Sempron in India. It’s interesting because of the fact that these new APUs are low-cost and this should automatically drive down the prices of the PC systems integrating them.
The hardware is aimed at emerging markets, with ‘performance at low power’ being one of the projected advantages. Of course, these APUs will have to be clubbed with AMD AM1 motherboards since they run on the company’s freshly unveiled computing platform.
The chipsets which are part of the latest releases include the Sempron 3850 and 2650 as well as the Athlon 5350 and 5150. The lowest priced one is the Sempron 2650 which costs Rs 2299 owing to the fact that it has only two cores. The others deliver quad core power, with the Sempron 3850, Athlon 5150 and Athlon 5350 pegged at Rs 2649, Rs 3299 and Rs 3999, correspondingly.
Starting from the cheapest to the most expensive APU, their CPU frequencies are clocked at 1.45GHz, 1.3GH, 1.6GHz and 2.05GHz. In the same order, each of these chips carrying 128 GPU cores boasts of 400MHz, 450MHz, 600MHz and 600MHz again in the GPU frequency department.
Mainboards outfitted with these APUs will be capable of accommodating a pair of SATA 6Gbps ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, a couple of USB 3.0 ports, PCIe 2.0 lanes for upgrading your graphics card, and DisplayPort, HDMI as well as VGA video outputs. They will support DirectX 11.2 and Windows 8.1 too.
We’re waiting to see how much of the benefits in price will be passed on from system builders to customers with these low-cost AM1 Athlon and Sempron APUs.