14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices continues in the same vein as before, that of launching products on par with the competition but at very low prices in comparison. The latest announcement is of the A10-6790K APU.
Well, announcement might be too strong a word, seeing as how AMD hasn't exactly launched the accelerated processing unit yet.
Nevertheless, market watchers and leak hunters are never idle, so even if AMD didn't officially release the chip, we know pretty much everything about it.
Most recently, the price was revealed, and it's a very encouraging price indeed. Not necessarily because it is itself affordable, but because it caused price cuts to A6 and A8 APUs.
After all, you can't exactly have A8 SKUs selling for $112 / €112 when the A10-6790K, with just slightly lower specs than the top part A10-6800K, bears a tag of $122 / €122.
But we digress. Basically, the A10-6970K has been priced at $122 / €122, 16% behind the A10-6800K ($140 / €140). That's not bad when the performance is only 1% behind.
For those who want the specs, the newcomer is a quad-core unit with 4 GHz base clock (4.3 GHz Turbo Core), 4 MB L2 cache, HD 8670D graphics, and 100 Watt TDP (thermal design power).
Meanwhile, the A6-6400K has dropped from $71 / €71 to $62 / €62 (a 12.7% decrease), the A8-6500 from $112 / €112 to $97 / €97 (13.4%) and the A8-6600K from, again, $112 / €112 to $97 / €97.
All in all, compared to Intel's CPUs that cost hundreds of dollars, even a thousand, AMD has a clear advantage. Sure, the performance isn't really close to Core i5/i7, but when even the 8-core FX-9370 and FX-9590 ship for $224 / €224 and $306 / €306, the message is pretty clear: come to us for good but affordable CPUs/APUs.