A leak on the internet has given APU fans some performance information about the new Richland APU family. On average, performance has increased by about 30%.
AMD’s APU family has received a lot of attention lately because of where its taking the company. Their new Temash and Kabini chips, based on the new Jaguar processor and Radeon HD8000 GCN (Graphics Core Next) graphics, are going into low-cost notebooks and tablets and are very capable of playing on the same field as Intel’s processors.
Jaguar itself is powering the next-generation consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) and it will presumably be a development mule for the company’s next APUs that will launch this time next year.
In addition, AMD’s APUs have been outselling its FX lineup of processors since November 2012, making up almost 75% of all processor sales for the company. They are on a roll and Richland aims to keep the ball rolling.
Its a tweaked Trinity-series APU with dual-channel DDR3-2133 support, higher-clocked AMD HD8000 graphics (rebranded from the HD7000 integrated chips) and more and better power consumption states, giving the processor more room for boosting stock clocks and saving power when its needed. Performance was also quoted by AMD as a 25% improvement and recent leaked benchmarks seem to match that figure.
The benchmarks were leaked by ZOL.com and the results were taken down an hour after they went up. The A10-6800K was benchmarked and there is quite a change in memory performance alone. The upgraded integrated memory controller now supports dual-channel DDR3-2133 kits, whereas Trinity stopped at DDR3-1866 in dual-channel mode and dropped that down to DDR3-1600 when four modules were used.
From the AIDA64 cache and memory benchmark it looks like the platform still suffers from low read and write speeds on system memory due to latency. The read and write speeds for the L1 and L2 cache drop a little from results that the A10-5800K achieved, but overall the higher memory frequencies should make up for that.
The 3DMark 11 results are promising. The A10-6800K with dual-channel DDR3-2400 memory achieves a score of P1773, but overclocking the integrated Radeon HD8670D graphics core boosts that to P2221, a healthy boost of 448 points. If you have a look at the temperature graph as well, the APU never goes above 48º C. That may have been achieved with water-cooling, but it is an impressive figure.
| AMD APU Model |
Cores | CPU Clock | Boost Clock | L2 Cache | Integrated GPU | TDP | RRP (US $) |
| AMD A10-6800K | 4 | 4.1GHz | 4.4GHz | 4MB | HD8670D | 100W | $143 |
| AMD A10-6700 | 4 | 3.7GHz | 4.3GHz | 4MB | HD8670D | 65W | $122 |
| AMD A10-6600K | 4 | 3.9GHz | 4.2GHz | 4MB | HD8570D | 100W | $112 |
| AMD A8-6500 | 4 | 3.5GHz | 4.1GHz | 4MB | HD8570D | 65W | $91 |
| AMD A4-6500K | 2 | 3.9GHz | 4.1GHz | 1MB | HD8470D | 65W | $69 |
The announced line-up does look good and the clock speeds are pretty high, as AMD has had a lot of time to perfect manufacturing these processors. The change in L2 cache assignments is interesting. That means that AMD is sticking with 1MB of L2 cache per fore but fuses off half of that with the A4-6500K to drop it to a lower price point.
The review embargoes on these processors should lift up in the beginning of June and we’ll see them for the first time in an updated lineup of motherboards with the new A88X, A78 and A68 chipsets on socket FM2.
For gamers, this means that you’ll be able to get even better performance out of a low-cost APU build and these chips make a great backbone for a small, cheap and highly portable LAN rig.
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