Microchip manufacturer AMD appears to be focused and deeply committed to its desktop products. The chip manufacturer recently announced that it has started shipping its seventh generation A Series of processors for desktop computers.
In a statement posted on the AMD's official website, AMD corporate vice president and general manager of client computing Kevin Lensing said that the new seventh generation A Series chip "marks a major increase in productivity performance, streaming video and eSports gaming experiences."
AMD said that HP and Lenovo machines are among the first to carry its new A Series processors. The new A Series chips have four Excavator cores, instead of the highly popular Zen cores. AMD is also making headways in the power consumption of its new chips, with the latest models requiring only 35 and 65 watts of power.
While some are skeptical about the processing prowess of chips that have low power requirement, AMD's newest A12 9800 processor is just as fast as an Intel Core i5-64500 in terms of general computing using the PCMark benchmark test, according to Engadget. Using the A12 9800's integrated graphics, the chip is twice as fast as its Intel counterpart when tested in 3DMark.
The seventh generation AMD A12 9800 chip has four cores with a base clock of 3.8GHz and max clock speed of 4.2GHz. It has a Radeon R7 integrated graphics and 65W TDP.
The new A Series processors from AMD support DirectX 12, and also feature the company's Radeon Graphics Core Next. These new chips also support native video decoding for 4K resolution in both H.265 and H.264 formats. This should take a significant amount of processing stress from the system, especially when playing Ultra HD videos.
AMD's seventh generation A Series are the first line of processors that will support the company's new AM4 platform, along with the interfaces that come with it. The new AMD AM4 platform supports USB 3.1 and NVMe solid state drives.