Faster, more power-efficient laptops start to land

The first wave of notebook PCs powered by AMD’s new sixth-generation A-series APU (previously known as Carrizo) are arriving on the market with Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba all expected to deliver models built around the high-powered processors, which combine fast operation with powerful graphics and extended battery life very soon.

AMD describes the new A-Series as ‘the world’s first high-performance APU in a System-on-Chip (SoC) design’
The new processors offer higher performance and much-extended battery life for notebooks, 2-on-1 devices and tablets. The new CPUs are based on AMD’s x86 ‘Excavator’ core design and are designed with Microsoft’s Windows 10 in mind making use of up to 12 compute cores – four CPUs and eight GPUs. With advanced Radeon graphics built in, they will be well-suited to video streaming and online gaming.

Power consumption of the new processors is very low and this will enable manufacturers to design mobile systems that offer ‘all day’ battery life, says AMD.

AMD has also recently announced desktop versions of the chip, which should find their way into designs during Q4.