A10-6800K, AMD's Top 28nm Richland APU

Just like NVIDIA's GeForce 700 series graphics cards and Intel's Haswell CPU collection, AMD's Richland line of upcoming accelerated processing units is turning heads whenever it makes a sound.

This time around we are getting acquainted with the mightiest Richland APU, called A10-6800K and set for mass production in late March 2013.

The manufacturing ETA (estimated time of arrival) doesn't mean it will ship that soon though. In fact, AMD doesn't expect to officially launch the processor before June.

That's no problem though. It will give the existing series of accelerated processing units a decent market lifetime.

But we digress. The Richland A10-6800K is based on the 28nm manufacturing process technology, the same one used for AMD's Radeon GPUs and NVIDIA's own chips.

There are four x86 cores, plus a Radeon HD 8000 series graphics processing unit, all packed inside a package compatible with FM2 socket motherboards.

Obviously, the Turbo Core technology is supported, allowing the clock frequency of one or all cores to go higher than normal when applications demand it.

Unfortunately, despite the rest of the details being more or less known, the actual performance numbers haven't been disclosed, so we have to wait for another leak to expose the clock speeds and such.

That said, samples of the Richland chip might have already been completed, although they might only be released in January.

March, as we said, will only be the start of mass production, while June is when people will actually be allowed to buy it.

By then, Windows 8 should have reached its full stride, so the PC market may finally see that sales rebound everyone has been hoping for.

In addition to AMD’s A10-6800K, there will be three more quad-core units and a couple of dual-core processors. Their specs are just as unknown as those of the flagship product.