AMD quietly releases ultra low power APUs

The launch of AMD "Trinity" mobile lineup back in May included two low- and ultra-low voltage microprocessors. Featuring only 25 Watt or lower Thermal Design Power, new chips were supposedly to be cheaper than Intel's ULV offerings. A quick look at current prices shows that AMD thin-and-light notebooks are indeed less expensive than Intel-based ultrabooks, although this partially can be explained by more stringent Ultrabook requirements, such as notebook's height and battery life. Nonetheless, AMD low power chips do provide so much needed for consumers competition to Intel, and the good news is that AMD recently released two more ULV processors: A4-4355M and A8-4555M. Details of these CPUs were added to a product specification page, located here. Furthermore, the same page reveals previously unknown C-Series C-70 APU.

Like A6-4455M, that was in production for a few months, AMD A4-4355M has two CPU cores, 17 Watt TDP, on-chip GPU with 327 MHz stock and 424 MHz turbo graphics frequencies, and 17 Watt TDP. This is where similarities end. The A4 chip operates at 1.9 GHz, i.e. at 200 MHz lower speed than the A6-4455M. The maximum Turbo Core frequency on the A4-4355M is 2.4 GHz, which is also 200 MHz lower than on the A6 APU. The A4-Series processor has only 1 MB of level 2 cache, and the number of GPU shader units were cut from 256 to 192. Although A4's reduced feature-set will obviously result in lower performance, we believe that the APU will be priced accordingly, which will allow OEM manufacturers to release less expensive ultra-thin laptops.

The second "Trinity" ULV product, A8-4555M, is a quad-core APU with 4 MB L2 cache. The processor is clocked at 1.6 GHz, or up to 2.4 GHz with active Turbo Core feature, that is 400 MHz slower than on the announced in May AMD A10-4655M. However, the A8-4455M has 19 Watt TDP, and that makes it the only consumer quad-core x86 microprocessor with TDP lower than 25 Watt. The A8-4555M has integrated graphics, running at 320 MHz, or up to 424 MHz when graphics turbo boost is activated.

The third new APU is Bobcat-based C-70, which in all respects is similar to C-60 model. It's a dual-core processor, operating at 1 GHz. It supports Turbo Core technology, that can temporary "overclock" the chip up to 1.33 GHz. The C-70 has 1 MB L2 cache, and it integrates GPU with 80 shader cores. The graphics unit works at 276 MHz, and the maximum graphics turbo frequency is limited to 400 MHz. Lastly, AMD C-70 has 9 Watt TDP. Again, these features are identical to C-60, and it's not obvious what's the difference between the SKUs.

All three APUs are manufactured in a BGA package. The summary of their features is provided in the table below:

Model	Cores	Frequency stock / turbo	L2 cache	Graphics	GPU stock /turbo frequency	Shader cores	Memory	TDP
C-70	2	1 / 1.33 GHz	1 MB		276 / 400 MHz	80	DDR3/L-1066	9 Watt
A4-4355M	2	1.9 / 2.4 GHz	1 MB	HD 7400G	327 / 424 MHz	192	DDR3/L-1333	17 Watt
A8-4555M	4	1.6 / 2.4 GHz	4 MB	HD 7600G	320 / 424 MHz	384	DDR3/L-1333	19 Watt