HiGame

When Kaveri debuted 15 months ago, it offered a number of i mpressive under-the-hood improvements for heterogeneous compute workloads, a refreshed CPU core, and the best integrated graphics performance available on any platform. AMD has already announced that its Carrizo and Carrizo-L APUs will ship in volume beginning this quarter, but those are mobile-only parts. Today, the company is also launching the A10-7870K — a new, updated version of the A10-7850K with tweaked CPU clock speeds and a significantly faster GPU.

The speeds and feeds are self-explanatory. The A10-7870K will offer a5.4% faster base clock and 2.5% faster boost clock for the CPU cores. In practice, these gains are likely below the threshold of perception for common users, though they’ll be a slight boost to overall test results. The larger increase is on the GPU side, where clock frequencies have leapt up to 866MHz, an increase of 20%. TDP for this part is unchanged, at 95W.



That’s going to pay some GPU performance dividends for AMD, though these gains will be relatively constrained by the A10-7870K’s memory bandwidth limitations. While the APU performance is still the best you can buy for an integrated chip, the dual-channel DDR3 memory interface puts the brakes on absolute performance.

There’s actually a bit of good news on that front if you’re considering the APU option. DDR3-2400 still commands a price premium, but the cost of 8GB of DDR3-2400 with decent timing (11-13-13-30) is just $56 over at NewEgg. Adding high-speed memory to an APU meaningfully improves its overall performance — with DDR3-2400, AMD predicts 2x the GPU performance of a single-channel configuration with DDR3-1600.



That said, there’s a definite drop-off as frequencies rise — DDR3-2400 is only estimated by AMD as 11% faster than DDR3-1866, despite clocking in at 28% faster in terms of sheer clock speed. Latencies can also impact how much benefit you get from higher RAM clocks. If you’re considering an APU, check memory prices and plan for what meets your own needs.

AMD claims that the A10-7870K is targeting gamers with sub-1080p monitors, which is apparently common in the Asia-Pacific market region, and will therefore include support for the virtual screen resolution capabilities that debuted with AMD’s Catalyst Omega driver. VSR allows a GPU to render internally at higher resolutions before outputting in the lower mode. We suspect performance in this mode will depend on how memory bandwidth dependent the internal rendering is — some titles will likely handle the jump more gracefully than others.



AMD is claiming that the A10-7850K will beat a Core i3 + GeForce GT 740 when the APU is connected up to DDR3-2400 memory. Obviously such claims should be taken with a grain of salt — the GT 740 is a very low-end Nvidia card. Still, in certain cases, a single APU can outperform some CPU + GPU pairs.

Modest improvements, better pricing

The A10-7870K isn’t likely to change anyone’s opinions on APUs — you either like them, or you don’t — but 15 months post-launch, AMD has offered a number of improvements to the overall Kaveri package. Kaveri supports FreeSync, and the frame-smoothing effects of operating in that mode are most apparent at lower refresh rates (30 FPS with FreeSync / G-Sync looks much different than a sustained 120 FPS). Adding support for virtual screen resolutions in-driver is another nice touch, as is the increased GPU clock speed.
Meanwhile, the entire package is available at a much more reasonable price of $137, as opposed to the A10-7850K’s launch price of $180. At that price, there’s a solid argument to be made for an all-in-one APU with superior graphics performance as compared to the Core i3 family from Intel with a faster CPU.


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