AMD’s new Fusion A series has arrived and beside the graphical power of the new architecture we were also impressed by the relatively low energy consumption. in our tests with the entry model AMD A6-3650 we have managed to lower energy consumption with 25%, without performance loss.
AMD A6-3650 is a toned down version of AMD A8-3850 that we have already tested. The processor has a lower clock frequency at 2.6 GHz, but still has four CPU cores. Also the graphics processor has been cut down with fewer Radeon cores (320 vs. 400) and a lower clock frequency.
Despite that the circuit has the same specified TDP at 100 watt. We hope to complete our tests of AMD A6-3650 in the coming days, but we can offer som exciting apetizers already.
Besides our overclocking tests and regular energy consumption tests we decided to try and undervolt the new mid-range processor. AMD is pretty generous with the voltage of the 32nm architecture and AMD A6-3650 has a CPU voltage at 1.4V. In our tests we lowered this to 1.2V without lowering frequencies or losing stability. We also dropped the APU VDDP voltage from 1.1V to 0.95V and our regular energy consumption tests.
There is a lot to reduce with AMD’s new 32nm processors
We will share more in the future, but in our CPU test with load in Cinebench we measured an improvment of over 25% in the total system energy consumption, which means we have reduced the energy costs by 25% if a Llano system without losing any performance.
There is no doubt that AMD has picked a high security treshold for its new Llano circuits and even if all samples behave individually we would think that most AMD Fusion A processors can undervolt quite a lot without problems. With its relatively powerful integrated GPU this should make Fusion A even more interesting for office PCs or for that matter HTPCs. A micro-ATX, or perhaps even mini-ITX, should reduce energy consumption even further.
More information on AMD A6-3650 will come in the days to follow.
