AMD today announced its 2nd generation AMD A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APU) for mainstream and ultrathin notebooks. The new APUs, codenamed “Trinity” have an improved design over previous generation and offer following new features:

• Double the performance per watt of the previous generation;
• The AMD HD Media Accelerator with a unique set of technologies designed to optimize video quality available with premium and Internet video content, and accelerate video file conversion;
• An increase in CPU performance of up to 29 percent with higher processor speeds thanks to the next-generation AMD “Piledriver” CPU core with 3rd-Generation AMD Turbo Core technology, where power is dynamically shifted between the CPU and GPU depending on application needs, effectively providing a more responsive experience that can boost CPU frequencies to up to 3.2 GHz;
• AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics for an increase of graphics performance up to 56% over the previous generation. Combined, the CPU and GPU cores deliver more than 700 gigaflops of computing performance – several times more than the fastest x86 CPUs – to boost performance of hundreds of applications;
• Up to 12 hours of battery life through CPU and GPU power enhancements, with clear battery life leadership in notebook form factors.

AMD has launched the new A-Series with three APUs for mainstream laptops and two APUs for ultrathin laptops. On the mainstream side, following APUs are available:

• A10-4600M: Featuring quad core CPU running at 2.3GHz and HD 7660G Radeon graphics with 384 cores running at 497MHz. The APU has 4MB L2 cache, 35W TDP and support for DDR3 1600/1333 memory.
• A8-4500M: Featuring quad core CPU running at 1.9GHz and HD 7640G Radeon graphics with 256 cores running at 497MHz. The APU also has 4MB L2 cache, 35W TDP and support for DDR3 1600/1333 memory.
• A6-4400M: Featuring quad core CPU running at 2.7GHz and HD 7520G Radeon Graphics with 192 cores running at 497MHz. Even though this APU has higher clock speed it has lower GPU horsepower and just 1MB L2 cache. Other specifications are same as other two APUs.

On the Ultrathin side, AMD has the following two APUs:

• A10-4655M: Featuring quad core CPU running at 2.0GHz and HD 7620G Radeon graphics with 384 cores running at 360MHz. The APU has 25W TDP, 4MB L2 cache and supports DDR3 1333/1066 memory.
• A6-4455M: Featuring dual core CPU running at 2.1GHZ and HD 7500G Radeon graphics with 256 cores running at 327MHz. The APU has 17W TDP, 2MB L2 cache and support DDR3 133/1066 memory.

Laptop based on new A-Series APUs from Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba are available beginning today with starting price as low as $649.

AnandTech, HotHardware, Hexus and PC Perspetive have posted reviews of the new A-Series APUs. And the reviews are very positive specially when is comes to integrated GPU performance. However, AMD still lags behind Intel when it comes to CPU performance. In fact, some reviewers have written that AMD’s new A-Series is still behind Intel’s last generation Sandy Bridge processors. Jarred Walton wrote on AnandTech:

Intel continues to offer better CPU performance, and if you need graphics—which mostly means you want to play games—they have a good partner with NVIDIA. AMD on the other hand is delivering better integrated graphics performance with less CPU power, and depending on what you want to do that might be a more well rounded approach to mobile computing.

Overall, AMD’s new A-Series Trinity APUs are a step in right direction and depending on your requirements can be a good option. Especially, if the prices of upcoming laptops based new APUs are right (rumors are prices will start as low as $649).