Stefan Mileschin

Had you been cruising these pages in the early hours of this morning, you'd know that the very first laptop to contain AMD's next generation of discrete graphics chips was quietly put up for sale over in Germany. The chipmaker has now confirmed that this machine -- the Asus Vivobook U38DT -- is indeed shipping, with a Trinity APU and hitherto unknown Radeon HD 8555M GPU on board. At the same, it's made a few promises about what the new discrete graphics components are capable of. These claims include the typically confusing graph above, which at first glance may appear to show an 8000M-series chip trebling the performance of NVIDIA's Geforce 650M (of 15-inch Retina MBP fame), but which actually suggests a 20-70 percent lead over the six-month-old competitor -- and with no information about power consumption to help us make a proper judgment. There are some straightforward factual details too, thank goodness, and you'll find them right after the break.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/17/a...-8000m-series/