What: AMD (NYSE: AMD) today updated its A-Series line-up of desktop and notebook Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), further improving its top-performing family of dual- and quad-core APUs. The updated AMD A-Series APUs combine up to four x86 CPU cores with up to 400 Radeon™ cores, delivering powerful DirectX®11-capable, discrete-level graphics and dedicated HD video processing on a single chip. Plus, only AMD APUs offer AMD Dual Graphics for an up to 144 percent visual performance boost when a select APU is paired with a select AMD Radeon™ HD 6500 Series graphics card. These new APUs increase performance and deliver a richer feature set than existing AMD A-series APUs. for the first time users can tune both x86 and graphics settings in a single processor for boosted performance.

Async and Await. When the asynchronous task completes, the Async method is resumed at the point from which it suspended. In other words, the application remains single-threaded but that thread is more productive and as a result, the application remains more responsive. These operators simply allow the compiler to structure the execution path such that the execution thread isn't blocked when an asynchronous method is called. When method execution encounters the Await operator on a task, execution suspends and immediately returns to the calling method. First introduced in Visual Studio 2010 as the Async CTP, the Async modifier flags a method or lambda as an asynchronous method. This makes it much easier to add asynchronous code in areas where it was previously difficult, such as loops...