The second generation of AMD A-Series hybrid processors, announced earlier in October, are already integrated in a number of graphics solutions. The newly appeared products are compatible with Socket FM2 only and cannot be applied for Socket FM1 infrastructure. This implies that a number of motherboards lose their upgrade facilities and can't be updated with a new advanced solution. Still, the market is currently ready to present a few boards destined to operate with the updated AMD A-Series. Gigabyte is one of the pioneers in this respect, introducing its motherboard GA-F2A85X-UP4, developed specifically for Socket FM2.



Integration


Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 is designed in ATX form-factor with 305x244 mm PCB dimensions. AMD A85X chipset is a heart of the motherboard; it secures the compatibility with A-Series (second gen.) APU and Athlon CPUs in the implementation of Socket FM2. The overall TDP level claimed for the model is not more than 100W. The PCB allots four DIMM slots …

Not so long ago AMD held a private presentation for investors and partners dedicated to the strategic plans for 2013. Its PDF-version has recently appeared online and immediately called attention of all interested parties. The most unexpected news concerned the long-awaited Steamroller micro-architecture. According to AMD, the debut of an advanced architecture will be accomplished in the current year, not in 2014 as it was informed earlier. Steamroller will be incorporated into an updated series of AMD Opteron server processors which are to ensure an improved efficiency level on parallel data processing operations.


The other promising piece of news touches upon the launch of a new APU series already this year: AMD Kabini and AMD Temash. Kabini is going to replace Brazos platform employed in small-sized multimedia systems and other hand portable solutions. In its turn, Temash is going to be implemented into highly-efficient tablet PCs, running under Windows 8 OS platform.
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Last week Intel announced a new instrumentality for upgrading desktop PC, called Thunderbolt Ready. This tool will help in incorporating Thunderbolt interface into the motherboards which initially do not have the support for it. However, only the motherboards with ‘Thunderbolt Ready’ marking and an inbuilt General-purpose I/O (GPIO) socket might fall under the upgrade. In addition to this feature, the user will have to acquire a dedicated card to enable the interface.



This card is installed into an appropriate PCI Express slot and is then connected to GPIO, as well as DisplayPort socket of the integrated/discrete GPU controller, due to the cables that go in batch. After this, the customer needs to upload dedicated software in order to activate the Thunderbolt. According to Intel, there are currently more than 100 alike products with Thunderbolt support; the majority of them are certified for the usage with PCs on Windows or Mac OS X platforms.


To continue, Asus is one …