There’s no guarantee that they’ll be in the next MacBook Pro or MacBook Air that you buy, but there’s cool AMD stuff on the horizon.
Per Engadget, AMD has announced that it’s planning to release a fresh batch of low-power APUs just 11 months after Trinity. Known as “Richland”, this generation won’t be vastly different at the silicon level, as it’s built on the same 32nm process as Trinity, has the same number of transistors and offers very similar compute performance in terms of raw GFLOPs. However, there are some noteworthy upgrades in attendance, including a move to Radeon HD 8000M graphic processors, which are claimed to deliver a 20-40 percent increase in “visual performance” in higher-end models, plus power-saving tweaks that should provide over an hour of additional battery life while watching 720p video.
The top-end quad-core A10-5750M is claimed to beat a laptop Core i7 by over 50 percent in terms of 3DMark performance, and even a dual-core A6-5350M is said to have a 20 percent advantage. There’s no sign of any all-round computing benchmarks, however, or even real-world gaming frame rate comparisons, so it’ll be up to later benchmarking efforts somewhere down the line.
Richland should arrive in regular-shaped notebooks (with TDPs between 20 and 35 watts) starting next month, while ultra-thin notebooks (17 watts or less) and desktop parts should get here by the summer. By then, we’ll be a lot closer to the launch of AMD’s Kaveri APUs, which are to due to ship before the end of this year and should represent a more radical leap than Richland. And in the midst of all this, there’s also Intel’s upcoming Haswell architecture, which is set to debut sometime this year.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.