AMD A8-4555M Review

The A8-4555M is one of AMD's mid-range-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2012 with 4 cores and 4 threads. With base clock at 1.6GHz, max speed at 2.4GHz, and a 19W power rating. The A8-4555M is based on the Trinity 32nm family and is part of the A8 series.

The AMD A8-4555M marks yet another blast from Team AMD, ramping up the intensity of the AMD vs Intel processor war. Still, though, there’s more than just core counts when it comes to a mainstream processor, as single-core performance needs to be on point, especially if you’re hoping to play the best PC games.

AMD's Piledriver series has landed, upping the ante with Intel in its high-stakes game for desktop PC market dominance with a well-rounded lineup of new chips that push mainstream platforms to higher core counts and more raw compute than we've ever seen. As a result, Intel's commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven't seen in over a decade.

As we've seen, gaming remains an advantage for Intel, so if squeezing out every last frame is all you care about, Intel's processors are a good choice. Much of that performance advantage will be less noticeable when gaming at higher resolutions, or if you pair the processors with a lesser graphics card.

One of the nice things about the AMD A8-4555M processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD A8-4555M up for $203.51 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD A8-4555M retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 19W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

The A8-4555M clocks up to 2.4Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 2.5GHz. However, don’t expect to get much beyond that without seriously upgrading your cooling solution and manually tweaking voltages behind the operating system level.

There’s a saying that two heads are better than one and, well, 4-cores are better than 2. The extra processing power of the A8-4555M puts Intel’s processors to shame, including both its closest competitor and a much higher-spec part.

AMD arms A8-4555M with a 1.6 GHz base frequency that jumps as high as 2.4 GHz under lightly-threaded tasks. The A8-4555M also offers a 1.6 GHz clock rate with all cores active. Meanwhile, Intel keeps its Core i3-3130M operating at a static 2.6 GHz clock rate.