These chips offer either dual or quad core processors and fall somewhere between the A Series and the FX series in price.

The first is the Athlon (not to be confused with its APU twin). There are only two of these chip types on the market right now.

The next category that AMD has is their CPU lines. Reasonably powerful modest gaming computers at affordable price Low Cost system with lighter workload like a home file serverįaster quad core, 1.5-2.1 MHz speed (avg) clock speedsĢ-4 Core CPU, 2-8 Core GPU, huge power required Below is a chart comparing the APU lines and their best uses.ĭual/Quad Core, 1-2 MB Cache, 1.4 MHz (avg) clock speeds Within the A Series, there are almost 2 dozen variations of the chips because there is so much flexibility between the CPU and GPU core power. In addition, the clock speeds and amount of cache increase with the line. As you move through each line, price and performance increase by bettering the number of cores in the GPU or increasing the performance of CPU. The Sempron series is the low end, cost efficient line, while the A Series is the top of the APU performance line.

CPUs on the other hand can handle bigger builds and better high-end gaming than an APU will.ĪMD also created names for these specific lines to help distinguish their target market and set price points accordingly. When comparing apples to apples, APUs are going to perform better on smaller systems where less power and graphics are required, like a laptop. Within these two categories, AMD has several different lines of chips depending on which end of the market you are looking at. An APU, or accelerated processing unit, is a CPU combined with graphics cards (GPU) in the same component to save space. Most already know that a CPU is the processing unit for your computer, the “brains” in a sense. AMD currently has two unique kinds of processing chips – APUs and CPUs. Both of these pieces are very important to keep in mind when talking about naming CPUs. The second piece is the name of the CPU line, or what end of the market these chips belong in. This is the way in which the chip was actually designed and constructed, and usually falls in line with the generation of the CPU chip. When we talk about CPUs, there are several distinct differences that make each chip unique. Both of these companies designed clever and tricky name schemes for their CPUs, making it more difficult to determine which CPU is better than another. Now, the name of the game has changed, and Intel and AMD have changed their naming schemes with it. In simpler times, CPUs were named based on their core power and their clock speeds, making it easy to identify which was the best performing CPU.

Intel processor numbers explained