AMD to release Black Edition APUs on 26th of December

AMD is preparing to launch two new APUs in time for the end of 2011. The two new APUs will come from the A8 series and A6 series and are both to be quad core units. As they are APUs they both come in the FM1 socket package and as they are black edition variants they are both equipped with unlocked multipliers for simpler overclocking. Both the A8 3870K and A6 3670K chips pack four x86-x64 cores with 4MB of L2 cache as well as 400 or 320 Radeon cores respectively. The A8 model takes a higher clock speed of 3GHz while the A6 comes in at 2.7GHz.

AMD did some of its own testing and came up with a graph comparing the A6 and A8 black edition APUs to the closest priced Intel competitor the i3 2120 which performs on par with the A6 APU in CPU tests and slightly behind the A8 APU in CPU tests. Whilst in GPU tests both APUs dominate the Intel i3 2120 as the Sandy Bridge IGP is particularly weak compared to the APU graphics capabilities.

The A8-3870K Black Edition is expected to be priced at US $135, while the A6-3670K Black Edition is expected to go for $115, while the i3 2120 is priced at $129.99 on Newegg ( and note Socket 1155 motherboards also tend to be more expensive than FM1 motherboards too) so this market looks like another AMD win.

Source: DonanimHaber