14 DAY TRIAL // After months upon months of dodging questions and half-complete information leaks, Advanced Micro Devices has finally published the official details about the Kaveri accelerated processing units.
Set to go up for pre-order on January 14, the desktop APUs will combine Steamroller CPU cores with superior Radeon GCN cores.
So far, benchmarks have shown only a modest performance advantage over the Richland series, and the biggest differences show in synthetic tests, not games. Basemark CL to be precise.
Still, real-world benchmarks painted a promising picture as well, most notably Tomb Raider ran well without a discrete graphics card on top of things, at seemingly medium settings anyway.
According to the AMD presentation, the Kaveri can have up to 12 compute cores, which includes both the CPU cores and the GCN modules (graphics core next).
And since both the A10-7700K and the A10-7850K have four GCN Radeon modules, that means the A10-7850K and A10-7700K are quad-core CPUs with eight Radeon cores on top of it (512 stream processors at 654 MHz base and 720 MHz boost).
That is a crude description though, because the x86 and graphics cores work in tandem, showing that AMD has truly reached the goal it set for itself back when it bought ATI and started the Fusion project.
The A10-7850K has a clock of 3.6 GHz and a Turbo maximum frequency of 4 GHz, all on a TDP (thermal design power) of 95W. It should be able to reach 856 Gigaflops.
The processor gets 4 MB L2 cache as well, DDR3-2133 memory support and an unlocked multiplier (overclocking only limited by skill and temperature). The price will be of $173 / €173.
The A10-7700K is a 3.5 GHz unit with 4 MB L2 cache and only 6 shader units (384 processors at 720 MHz). The rest is the same though, except the price of $119 / €119 of course.
There should be a third unit as well, the A8-7600, also a quad-core, but with 3.1 / 3.8 GHz clocks and otherwise similar specs to A10-7700K, but no unlocked multiplier. The price will be of $119 / €119 here as well, owing to the smaller TDP of 65W.
