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.
I beg your pardon (Score:0, Interesting)
I thought I'm computer literate but this summary is so full of acronyms that I understand nada. Are we talking about discrete graphics cards here or what?
I love my AMD (Score:5, Interesting)
Benchmarks vs. Business PCs (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm trying to figure out right now whether office PCs will see the difference between AMD and Intel. It seems like as long as you install plenty of RAM, pretty much anything should handle a moderately multitasking business PC for at least a few years. I keep seeing posts of Intel vs AMD benchmarks, but even with the benchmarks being what they are, how much difference will a nontechnical end user really notice in an office environment? I run an AMD A8 quad core laptop at home, but it runs Linux and does just fine. I don't want to judge Windows performance based on my experience with Linux though.
Re:Fascinating misues of adjectives there! (Score:0, Interesting)
Your comment about overclocking the Richland and not the haswell is great and all, except for the fact that the haswell chip is defective by design as far as thermal transfer is concerned. Haswell still uses the same heat spreader design as Ivy bridge, so you have raw silicon - thermal paste - heat spreader - thermal paste - heatsink, instead of raw silicon - welded head spreader - thermal paste - heatsink.
What does this mean? It means that you CANNOT efficiently overclock desktop haswell processors, and that intel specifically designed it so that you cant. If anything when comparing Richland and Haswell components this should be taken into consideration from the start.
Here is an article that discussed the problems facing Ivy Bridge, Haswell's predecessor:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ivy-bridge-overclocking-high-temp,15512.html
And here is what you have to do to get reasonable temperatures out of these chips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXs0I5kuoX4
Who in their right mind would intentionally buy a cpu that uses thermal paste under the heatspreader?
Re:Fascinating misues of adjectives there! (Score:5, Interesting)
Richland's GPU is at best about 20% faster than the intentionally-midrange HD-4600 GPU in Haswell. Add in any form of desktop GPU, including midrange models from 2011, and Haswell wins by a landslide.
Yes, if you buy a $250-$350 CPU and then add a $100 video card, it will outperform a $150 all-in-one unit. No shit.
At CPU, I recall seeing delightfully hilarious graph where a 6800K overclocked to 5GHz had exactly half the score of the (stock clocked) 4770K. Before we get to the usual "But AMD is cheap!" argument, when you take into account the $150 price of the 6800K and the $350 price of the 4770K, AMD only wins on price/performance if you intentionally buy the most expensive Haswell model available and intentionally don't overclock it while also overclocking the crap out of the 6800K.
You're looking at this from an enthusiast perspective. But if I'm building a system for someone who mostly does web surfing, Office, and occasionally some light gaming like WoW and The Sims, then an AMD APU starts to look a lot better from a price/performance perspective. You assume that as long as the performance per dollar stays high, the buyer is willing to spend as much as necessary, but that's simply not true for most users. Probably 90% of users will never even hit the maximum limit of an A10-6800K, so for these people, Haswell is overkill.