AMD is ready to renew its assault on Intel’s dominance in the home PC market.
However, we’ll have to wait a few more months for the mighty Zen CPUs and Polaris GPUs. Instead, AMD has started the year with an upgrade to its motherboard, CPU line up and a new cooler.
The new line-up of processors and prices should provide some competitive offerings. The new top of the line models improve cache and hyperthreading, while benefiting from the new cooler.
• FX 8370 Wraith – $199.99.
• FX 8370 – $189.99.
• A10-7860K – $117.99.
• A8-7670K – $105.99.
• A8-7650K – $95.99.
• Athlon X4 870K – $89.99.
• Athlon X4 860K – $79.99.
• Athlon X4 845 – $69.99.
There’s a mix of Piledriver, Godavari and Carrizo cores in there, with new speeds to help round out the range. These should help shift Windows 10 boxes to consumers across the first half of the year.
AMD Plays It CoolThis is the first major update in over a year, and should see AMD’s interest in the desktop market ticking along. With the focus on the new Wraith cooler, you know the company doesn’t have much to shout about, claiming it is about one-tenth as loud as previous stock coolers.
The new APUs include a first retail Carrizo model, while the new motherboards now feature USB 3.1 and M.2 support via add-in controllers.
Also of interest is AMD’s virtualization of the GPU, offering AMD FirePro S-Series GPUs with Multiuser GPU (MxGPU) technology. This represents AMD’s stab at cloud gaming, cloud computing, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions.
If PC gaming ever moves to a cloud solution, more likely for consoles, but you never know, then these GPUs could flood your bandwidth with HD graphics straight to a big screen.
We’re not sure if these will ever take off in a major way, but cold provide niche solutions for some games services and businesses.
source:windows10update
