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What is an accelerated processing unit (APU)?

Jan. 8, 2011 (12:56 pm) By:

Earlier this week AMD had some big news and the term “APU” was tossed around a lot. This surely had a lot of people wondering what the heck an APU is and how it differs from a central processing unit (CPU).

The video above shows how an APU works by explaining the flow of data through the components involved. It also compares how a CPU works to how an APU does things. It’s helpful enough, but if you already know some of the basic terms (CPU, GPU, etc.) then Wikipedia’s definition might be better:

An APU integrates a CPU and a GPU on the same die thus improving data transfer rates between these components while reducing power consumption. APUs can also include video processing and other application-specific accelerators. Examples: Intel’s Sandy Bridge, AMD Fusion and NVIDIA’s Project “Denver”

Make more sense now? An APU is the combination of a CPU (generally a multi-core one), a graphics processing unit, and then some way to get them to play together nicely.

Why do this in the first place? Because it turns out that GPUs are good at things besides graphics, so the CPU can offload computing tasks to them. To optimize this cooperation bottlenecks between the CPU and the GPU had to be removed, the result being the APU!

via InsideHPC

  • http://itservicesboston.com/boston-it-consulting.html Lisa Moore

    That would be just perfect for many companies out there! Information technology has been booming ever since it started, and is also being used by many businesses today. Like what most people are seeing right now, the use of IT can really add to the progress rate of many companies!

  • http://techsea360.blogspot.com/ techsea360

    no need to buy extra graphics card…but i hardly believe that APU can compete with standerd GPUs 

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