AMD launches PRO A-series for commercial notebooks and desktops

To the public eye, AMD is but a shadow of its former self. Sift through the stacks of Apple, Intel, and Google headlines, however, and you'll find that AMD is still advancing and innovating at a steady rate. Mantle was announced much earlier than DirectX 12 while FreeSync and R9 Nano were pleasant surprises especially for Radeon fans.

Today's latest innovation comes in the form of the AMD PRO A-series of processors for both desktops and notebooks. The new series is designed with Windows 10 in mind and includes new pre-installed software such as Energy Saver, Health Center, USB Blocker, and Wireless Display.

So, what puts the "pro" in the PRO A-series? A ton of raw power, apparently. The highest PRO A12 configuration can operate up to 3.4 GHz, which is similar to the FX-8800P. It will also be the first quad-core mobile processor from the company to sport 12 compute cores with a Radeon R7 GPU clocked at 800 MHz. The GPU core itself will utilize 512 compute cores. The current AMD FX-8800P holds a similar Radeon R7 GPU, though its CPU consists of only 4 compute cores in comparison.

Additional features include Heterogeneous System Architecture 1.0 (HSA) for easier programming, ARM TrustZone for running sensitive tasks discreetly, and high-efficiency video compression (HEVC) decoding for streaming UHD content.

The PRO A-series is now available and launching first on the recently revealed HP EliteBook 705 G3 refresh. In fact, AMD is HP's exclusive partner for the EliteBook 725, 745, and 755 with no Intel solutions announced just yet.

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