AMD A10 6700 review - Introduction

AMD A10 6700 APU 

We have another AMD A10 series APU processor review ready for you guys. In this round we review the 125 EUR AMD A10 6700 APU processor, the little brother of the 6800K we just reviewed. Based on Piledriver architecture this processor slash graphics hybrid symbiosis called APU remains hard to beat in terms of features performance and well all the goodness you can expect from a great APU. Value and fun is what the platform offers. 

A quick word on what they are, APUs are able to combine the potential of x86 and GPU together to enable a new class of experiences and compute performance on today’s PCs. You know, back in May 2012 AMD introduced a series of AMD A10 'Trinity' APUs as mobile and notebook solutions. Trinity APUs where the the successor of the AMD A4, A6 and A8 Llano-processors. Today AMD marches onwards with Richland, basically in short wording this is a re-spin of Trinity. But before we start off this review, let me state this like we always do with APU reviews; see we are a bit of an enthusiast based website so I want 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 (in AMDs case) a an enhanced integrated GPU, and all that for very interesting prices. But they are not intended as enthusiast class PC gaming rigs okay ?

Today we test the A10 6700 APU for example, priced at roughly 125 EUR this is a four core processor with integrated graphics and motherboard chipset. Yeah, it really is a SoC. AMD released Richland to make their APUs a little more performance oriented for the PC crowd. The A10-6700 APU tested in this review is rated at 65W running at 3.9 GHz with a Turbo allowance towards 4200 MHz. For an APU these are high frequencies.  The A10 APU comes with a 4MB L2 cache and packs 384 Radeon (shader) cores with that embedded GPU running at 844 MHz, and that is slightly clocked faster then the A10 5800K (the previous flagship APU). Equipped with 384 Radeon (shader) cores, you might believe that by itself this is not a massive GPU, however in the IGP arena that's serious performance as even the Intel's new Haswell IGP can not compete with the performance that AMD can offer with the A10 APUs. The APU as expected is based on Piledriver cores, Piledriver simply put means the new 2nd revision of AMD's Bulldozers cores, these are very similar to AMD's FX series processors.

In this review today we'll have an overview of the new Richland family of APUs and of course we dive a little deeper into the performance of this product. Next page please.