New AMD A-Series APUs to take on Haswell with Radeon HD 8000 graphics

To compete with Intel's new Haswell line-up of chips, AMD has unveiled its new set of chips, the 2013 Elite A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). The new APUs, dubbed Richland, deliver much better performance than the previous series of Trinity chips. According to AMD, the new APUs have discrete-level graphics capabilities and easy upgrade infrastructure. The company showcased the new chips at the ongoing Computex event.

AMD has unveiled its new series of APUs

APUs have been incredibly successful for AMD ever since they were first launched back in 2011. The new APUs power high-end devices, including next-gen consoles like the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.

The A-Series APUs combine AMD's Piledriver CPU architecture with AMD Radeon HD 8000 series graphics on an FM2 motherboard infrastructure. The FM2 motherboards support forward compatibility as well as support for existing A85X, A75 and A55 platforms. The new APUs are quoted to have maximum clock speeds of over 4GHz.

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The Elite A-Series APUs combine the CPU with up to 384 Radeon parallel processing cores from Radeon HD 8000 series GPUs. Thanks to this, the APUs give 15 percent better graphics performance than its predecessor—the second-generation Trinity APUs.

The company showcased four APU models in the new line-up, dubbed the 6500, the 6600K, the 6700 and the 6700K. The 6500 is based on the A8 chip and is the lowest-end of the lot in terms of both price and power consumption. It has a TDP of 65W and is set to cost $112 (approximately Rs 6,326). The A8-based 6600K has a higher power consumption of 100W, but will cost the same as the 6500. The A10-based 6700 has a TDP of 65W and will cost $142 (approximately Rs 8,021) at launch. Available at the same price but with a higher TDP of 100W is the A10-based 6800K.