AMD Radeon HD 8610G vs AMD Radeon HD 8550G

AMD Radeon HD 8610G

The AMD Radeon HD 8610G is a processor graphics card in some of the low voltage AMD Richland APUs (A10-5745M). It offers the full amount of 384 shader cores (VLIW4 architecture) and clocks at 533 - 626 MHz. The 8610G has no dedicated graphics memory, but shares the main memory with the CPU cores.

The integrated video decoder (UVD3) allows the full decoding of Multi-View Codec (MVC), MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, xVid), MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and Adobe Flash HD videos.

According to the clock rates, the performance should be similar to the Radeon HD 7660G or the Intel HD Graphics 4600. Thus, the Radeon HD 8610G is as fast as a dedicated HD 6650M or NVIDIA GeForce GT 620M. Without fast dual-channel memory the performance drops dramatically, however. The shaders of the chip can also be used for general computing.

The APU is manufactured in 32nm and rated at a TDP of 25 watts. This allows the chip to be used in notebooks from 12 to 13 inches or bigger.

AMD Radeon HD 8550G

The AMD Radeon HD 8550G is a processor graphics card in the AMD Richland APUs (for example, the A8-5550M). It offers only 256 VLIW4 shader cores vs. the 384 shader cores of the 8650G. The 8550G has no dedicated graphics memory and shares the main memory with the CPU cores.

The integrated UVD3 video decoder allows for full decoding of Multi-View Codec (MVC), MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, xVid), MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and Adobe Flash HD videos.

According to its clock rate range of 515 - 720 MHz (or 554 - 720 MHz in an A8-5557M), performance is only a few percentage points above a Radeon HD 7640G. Thus, the Radeon HD 8550G performs similarly to a dedicated Radeon HD 7570M. Without fast dual-channel memory, however, performance drops dramatically. The shaders of the chip can also be used for general computing.

The APU is manufactured in 32nm and rated at a TDP of 35 W. This allows the chip to be used in notebooks from 13- to 14-inches or larger.