AMD Launches New Richland APUs For the Desktop, Speeds Up To 4.4GHz 153
MojoKid writes "AMD recently unveiled a handful of mobile Elite A-Series APUs, formerly codenamed Richland. Those products built upon the company's existing Trinity-based products but offered additional power and frequency optimizations designed to enhance overall performance and increase battery life. Today AMD is launching a handful of new Richland APUs for desktops and small form factor PCs. The additional power and thermal headroom afforded by desktop form factors has allowed AMD to crank things up a few notches further on both the CPU and GPU sides. The highest-end parts feature quad-CPU cores with 384 Radeon cores and 4MB of total cache. The top end APUs have GPU cores clocked at 844MHz (a 44MHz increase over Trinity) with CPU core boost clocks that top out at lofty 4.4GHz. In addition, AMD's top-end part, the A10-6800K, has been validated for use with DDR3-2133MHz memory. The rest of the APUs max out at with a 1866MHz DDR memory interface."
As with the last few APUs, the conclusion is that the new A10 chips beat Intel's Haswell graphics solidly, but lag a bit in CPU performance and power consumption.
Re:Fascinating misues of adjectives there! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah you're right. Fuck AMD. Let's support Intel, the anti-competitive market-abusing cocksuckers who had to secretly pay off Michael Dell to use their chips. That's a company I want to support with my money.
Re:I love my AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends heavily on use, though.
Intel's been focusing on single-thread performance and power efficiency - Haswell basically did nothing for performance, giving a few percentage points of improvement, but dropped the power consumption down to the point that putting it in a tablet actually makes sense. Idle power was a particular focus.
AMD's been focused more on multi-threaded performance, cramming a ton of cores onto one chip. In some cases that works well, but in others they suffer heavily. They also focused on integer, not floating-point, performance. Sadly, even when playing to AMD's strengths, Intel's process node advantage (and compiler advantage, oftentimes) lets them at least keep pace.
I will agree that AMD has been much better at socket compatibility. My 2006 Intel motherboard is now three sockets out of date, while my similar-age AMD board would probably work with a current Bulldozer. And AMD's pricing, thankfully, reflects their performance. I might be getting one of the Richland chips for a low-cost SFF build I'm planning.
Re:Still a step behind Intel (Score:4, Insightful)
In practice, how often do people upgrade a CPU in the same mobo these days anyway? Even in server settings it's not that common; it's more common to buy a CPU/mobo package, and keep it until it's time to replace both.