AMD A10
7850K APU
RRP: $185.99 | Website: www.amd.com
Test Machine
• GIGABYTE G1.Sniper A88X
• CORSAIR Dominator
Platinum 2x4GB DDR
2666MHZ C10
• INTEL 730 480GB SSD
• Cooler Master Silent Pro M2
1500W
• Windows 7 64-bit SP1
(Catalyst 13.25 WHQL)
A
MD has been pushing their
APUs rather aggressively
since the A10 5800K
Trinity from a few short years
ago. The idea was and does
remain simple. A synergistic
relationship between a graphics
core and a traditional serial
compute core or host CPU.
From just having these on the
same package to having these
two parts unified on a single
die. AMD has for the most part
done something incredible and
unprecedented with the latest
Kaveri APUs. Performance and
other factors aside, just from
20 The OverClocker Issue 29 | 2014
an engineering point of view
this is a milestone for AMD and
most certainly a first for general
computing platforms.
AMD’s journey to this point
hasn’t been easy, but the APUs
are by and large a successful
part of AMDs strategy and it
is fairly obvious why much of
the communications from the
company is centred around their
APUs or at least more so than
their CPUs which have actually
grown long in the tooth for the
most part.
APUs however over a slew
of features out the box like a
very competent graphics subsystem, native USB3.0 support,
SATA 6Gbps and a PCI-Express
3.0 complex. In essence there is
some parity with AMD’s latest
APU platform and what INTEL
offers on their products. The
only difference then mostly
is performance and power
consumption which can be
further broken down into many
other aspects.
We won’t go into the really
detailed parts of what makes
Kaveri significantly different
(at least from a graphics
perspective) from Richland
which it’s predecessor. As AMD
did not provide this information
to us amongst other things, but
the good news is that it is using
the same GCN architecture
as found on the 7000 series
graphics cards. In practical
terms this not only means better
performance, but it also means
that the Kaveri APUs have full
DirectX11.2 hardware support
along with OpenCL, Mantle and
obviously the latest OpenGL
support as well. Assuming that
the performance is there, it is
easily the most feature rich IGP
on the planet today.
Physically the new APU die
is massive, at over 2.4Billion
gates, compared to less than
1.4Bilion on the outgoing
Trinity APUs. The process
node is smaller though and
Global Foundries 28nm SHP
process has obviously allowed
AMD to manufacture these
at a reasonable cost without
sacrificing too much in terms of
frequency or heat output. These
may be built on a 28nm process,