What would you use this for? Gaming? 4k home media? Bitshekel mining? General purpose computer? I had to Google the term apu and I'm still not sure if I understand (whether it's marketing or something distinct).
> The AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), formerly known
> as Fusion, is the marketing term for a series of 64-bit
> microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD),
> designed to act as a central processing unit (CPU) and
> graphics processing unit (GPU) on a single die.
My understanding is that it has always been a CPU and GPU combined, but is some marketing wangle as you suggest. I've owned one in the past and it was generally quite fast in general use, I believe it off-loaded simple GPU related tasks to the GPU part of the APU which ultimately reduced the graphics latency.
This seems to be quite similar to the Mali GPU which can be bundled on ARM packages to handle simple graphics [2]. I believe this is how something like the Raspberry Pi can output 4k over HDMI despite not being particularly powerful.
It's way more power efficient to have an SFF do all the 24/7 IT-work and my gaming/main-PC only selectively powered up when I need it.
Quite a lot of motherboards will do the (I think) "three beeps" which means it's detected a missing graphics card.
But if you leave it to go for a small while (20 seconds?), they'll continue on after the pause then boot/run without problem.
Useful for home servers.