AMD Richland processors launched: review roundup

AMD’s Richland processor family has just been launched and the reviews are out. The processors are compatible with the FM2 socket and may or may not require a BIOS update.

Richland is a slight improvement on Trinity in terms of hardware. It enables a few functions that were disabled in Trinity, like extra heat sensors and a new power management scheme, that were initially disabled to improve the APU’s performance and get them out to market faster while the BIOS software was still being improved.

Indeed, Trinity users today benefit from some of the improvements that also apply to Richland – many users are reporting lower power use and slightly better performance with the new BIOS updates.

AMD Richland improvements

In terms of hardware, the processors are still based on Piledriver and sport dual-channel DDR3 controllers supporting speeds up to DDR3-2133. The processors are made up of modules, which integrates two cores closely together and shares cache and a floating-point math co-processor between them. The rest of the space on the chip is devoted to the GPU.

That’s been upgraded in a sense, as the new GPUs are officially part of the HD8000 family. However, they’re still based on the same hardware found in the HD6000 series and are equivalent to the baseline cards from that range, like the HD6450 and the HD6670. The APUs offer better GPU performance than their rival Intel processors at the same price range and in most cases offer playable performance at medium settings in most games at the standard 720p resolution.

AMD Richland APU	A10-6800K	A10-6700	A8-6600K	A8-6500	A6-6400K	A4-4000
Radeon GPU	HD8760D	HD8760D	HD8570D	HD8570D	HD8470D	HD7480D
TDP	100W	65W	100W	65W	65W	65W
GPU core count	384	384	256	256	192	128
GPU clock speed	844MHz	844MHz	844MHz	800MHz	800MHz	720MHz
CPU core count	4	4	4	4	2	2
CPU clock speed	4.1GHz	3.7GHz	3.9GHz	3.5GHz	3.9GHz	3.0GHz
CPU boost speed	4.4GHz	4.3GHz	4.2GHz	4.1GHz	4.1GHz	3.2GHz
L2 cache (shared)	4MB	4MB	4MB	4MB	1MB	1MB
Max DDR3 frequency	2133MHz	1866MHz	1866MHz	1866MHz	1866MHz	1866MHz
Multiplier-unlocked	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
RRP (US $)	$150	$149	$120	$119	$80	$46

The pricing is attractive and as usual, the A-series goes up against Intel’s Celeron, Pentium and Core i3 lineup, offering not only higher clock speeds but also boost speeds and three multiplier-unlocked products. Oddly enough, AMD is returning to the “Black Edition” moniker, a throwback to the old Phenom and Phenom II lineups when the “Black Edition” processors had unlocked multipliers.

As far as performance goes, it’s a minor step over Trinity. Comparing the same chips from the same price points, Richland will only be an average of 10-15% faster, with a 20% speed-up in some cases thanks to the higher boost states and the better thermal control.

In addition, there should be more overclocking headroom as the manufacturing processes for making these chips have improved. They have less leakage and stay at the boost clocks for longer periods of time.

Tech Report Cinebench R11.5

Tech Report load power consumption

Tech Report DiRT3 1280

Tech Report Skyrim 1280

Bit-tech Skyrim 1080p

Bit-tech L4D2 1080p

Tech Report Battlefield 3 1280

Iris Pro Battlefield 3

Game performance is still quite good and many online reviews show the Intel HD4600 graphics still trailing by some margin, despite 50% better performance. I’m not so sure what the issue is there, but perhaps the HD4600 is more memory-sensitive than its predecessor. I added in a score for Intel’s Iris Pro graphics on Battlefield 3 done by Anandtech and there is some discrepancy there in the A10-5800K results compared to what PC Perspective achieved.

Nevertheless, having that kind of power for a processor that draws under 120W for the entire system is no mean feat. The A10-6700 is the real winner here, offering the same in-game performance as the A10-6800K, while using DDR3-1866 memory and having a lower TDP (thermal design power). PC Perspective recorded an astounding 97W power draw for that chip.

AMD will be announcing the processor family officially at Computex Taipei today (5 June 2013) and they are already available in the US, Canada, the UK and most of Europe. AMD has not yet commented on pricing for an SA release.