AMD intros 35W Richland mobile APUs

Richland is here. The successor to AMD's Trinity APU has been shipping to PC makers since January, and today, we can tell you more about what it has in store—and what it doesn't. Although Richland will replace Trinity in notebooks and on the desktop, it isn't really new silicon. Trinity's Piledriver-based CPU cores remain, and the integrated GPU is still rooted in the graphics architecture of the Radeon HD 6900 series. Richland is even fabbed on the same 32-nm process as Trinity, albeit with some more efficient transistor tuning. AMD hasn't taped out a new chip design. Instead, it's taking fuller advantage of the hardware already built into the chip.