The APU - What it's about

The APU is the heart of the Fusion platform and you can see on the last two pages in the Fusion Hub Controller images what it does. Now we'll split the image up a bit, though, and look closer at what exactly is going on with the APU itself. Before we do that, let's first take a closer look at what the APU is capable of.

Out of the 69 page Lynx presentation, there's probably not a page more important than the above. In just a few words and images, it tells us exactly what the A Series APU does. Inside our APU, AMD combine what your typical Northbridge, Quad-Core CPU and mid-range DX11 capable video card would do all in a single low power package.

Looking above, you can see that the APU connects to our A55 or A75 chipset via a Unified Media Interface capable of offering 2 GB/s of data transfer. Like our Northbridge, CPU and Video Card would offer, you can see the APU is able to offer us DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI connectivity, DDR3 Memory support and PCI-E connectivity.

You can see in the below image how the APU itself is setup. On the top right hand side of our chip we have our x86 cores. For the current crop of Desktop APUs, that is a total of four. Next to that we have our memory controller which offers us dual channel DDR support at speeds of up to 1866MHz DDR.

On the left side you can see we have our "Radeon" core which is of course the graphics card and below that is the Unified Video Decoder or UVD, a feature we've seen available from AMD for quite a while. Finally, across the bottom we have our platform interfaces.