14 DAY TRIAL // Two new A8 and A10 APUs are being readied by AMD for desktop systems. These will be based on the "Kaveri" design instead of the older "Godavari" and will be only a slight improvement compared to existing APUs.
The new quad-core AMD A8-7690K and AMD A10-7890K are meant to feature clock rates and performance values slightly higher than those of the existing A8 and A10 APUs. The default frequency of the new APUs will be 4.10GHz instead of the current max of 3.9GHz of the A10 flagship APU from AMD. The A8 will have an increased frequency as well of at least 100MHz faster than the current A8.
Right now, according to CPU-World, it's unknown if the new APUs will have increased GPU frequency as well. From a microarchitecture point of view, the new APUs are similar to the current series, featuring four "Steamroller" cores, DirectX 12-class integrated graphics processor, featuring also a GCN 1.1 architecture, second-generation video coding engine (VCE) a fourth-generation unified video decoder (VCE) units that ensure high-quality video playback and support all modern encoding formats (MPEG 2, MPEG 4, H.264, VC-1, etc.) except H.265/HEVC, VC-9.
AMD likes its APU improvements to come often, and in small packages
AMD consider that its latest APUs that are part of the “Kaveri Refresh” family enjoy a reworked power supply circuitry, giving them a cleaner and higher volume power delivery to the die. This way AMD plans to give overclockers and enthusiasts enough headroom to further tweak and boost the APUs performance, going way past its “official” frequencies of its highly-integrated desktop chips.
The new APUs will enjoy Global Foundries' newest 28nm super high performance (SHP) process technology, staying within the very mature 29nm process for a while. It's somewhat understandable, since the traditionally high TDP of AMDs CPUs won't allow 14nm process APUs arrive very soon. Apparently, while AMD is adding its high-performance AMD A8-7690K and AMD A10-7890K, the company is also working on the low tier AMD A6-7470K as well as Athlon X4 850 and Athlon X4 870K.
The new APUs from AMD are supposed to hit the market in a couple of months.