AMD Announces Business Targeted PRO Series APUs
AMD has today announced a brand-new series of APUs that it targets at business use. Called AMD PRO, these A-series chips are designed to offer great performance and the dependability business environments require.
A major focus of AMD PRO is rock-solid Windows 10 support. While overall, Windows 10 support is going to be expected, AMD is making a major commitment to make sure that when businesses roll out a new fleet of laptops with Microsoft's latest OS, it's going to be as stable as can be, and also offer important features businesses want, such as refined control over their company-issued machines.
For small and medium-sized businesses that don't have their own system management tools, AMD is going to be providing its own tool called AMD PRO Control Center. This is dubbed as a one-stop shop for "intuitive" system configuration. Bundled in with this tool is AMD's Energy Saver, PC Health Center, USB Blocker, and also Wireless Display.
The top-end AMD PRO is going to be the A12, an APU with 12 compute cores (4 CPU + 8 GPU), which will stick out of the pack by being the only AMD PRO chip bundling Radeon R7 graphics in its hood. That IGP is going to be clocked at 800MHz, and will include an impressive 512 graphics cores.
Other highlights of AMD PRO include the fact that it's the first commercial processor to be compliant with the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) 1.0, includes ARM TrustZone support, and supports HEVC video decoding capabilities.
Out of the gate, AMD already has a major win with one major systems provider: HP. Alex Cho, HP's VP and GM of multiple service groups says, "As the industry embraces changes to the workforce, work styles and workplaces, AMD is a critical technology partner for us in developing solutions that can power the modern business".
AMD says that its PRO APUs will be featured in HP EliteBooks, including the 725, 745, and 755. While the focus so far has been put on mobile, there is also a desktop variant of AMD PRO. It features the same design and goals as the mobile counterpart, and will be made available in Lenovo's M79, as well as HP's EliteDesk 705.
AMD believes that systems bundling AMD PRO will become available later today.
