AMD A10 5700 review - Introduction

AMD A10 5700 APU - the 2nd Generation AMD A-Series

It's time for another AMD A10 series APU processor review. You know, back in May AMD introduced a series of AMD A10 'Trinity' APUs as mobile and notebook solutions. The new APU series is based on a new architecture that should bring its performance above previously released Llano based products from that same A series.

The new chips came with a codename that you all will recognize, Trinity. Trinity will thus be the successor of the current  AMD A4, A6 and A8 Llano-processors. First and foremost, we are a bit of an enthusiast based website so I need to make it very clear here, the A10 and A8 APU processors are entry level to mid-range targeted processors, please do understand that very clearly. That means you are looking at reasonable desktop CPU experience versus a greatly enhanced integrated GPU, and all that for very interesting prices.

Tested today is the A10 5700 APU for example, costing roughly 115 EUR, and that's a four core processor with integrated graphics and motherbaord chipset. Not bad huh ? Based on AMDs APU architecture there will be several models to be found which we'll place in an overview later on.

Our tested model is the A10-5700 APU is rated at 65W running at 3.4 GHz with a Turbo allowance towards 4000 MHz (if the conditions are right). This A10 APU have a 4MB L2 cache and pack 384 Radeon (shader) cores with that embedded GPU running at 800 MHz, just like its bigger brother the A10 5800K.

The 384 Radeon (shader) cores by itself is not a massive GPU change opposed to the previous generation which had 400 shader cores however the new AMD graphics architecture is applied and offers a significant leap in performance for integrated graphics alright. When we zoom in at the processor side for the APU then Trinity is based on Piledriver cores, Piledriver simply put means the new 2nd revision of AMD's Bulldozers cores, which we all know from AMD's FX series processors.

So before we dive a little deeper into the performance of the APU, I wanted to quickly talk about the APU and the technology behind it. Next page please.

** Update - we mistakenly noted down the A10 5700 APU as 5700K model a couple of times in this review. It's A10 5700 (without the K).