AMD A10 6800K review - Introduction

AMD A10 6800 APU - The Richland AMD A-Series has arrived

Hello, meet Richland. Ah yes, today another AMD A10 series APU processor review. 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 ?

As such today we test the A10 6800K APU for example, priced at roughly 135 to 145 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 A10-6800K APU tested in this review is rated at 100W running at 4.1 GHz with a Turbo allowance towards 4400 MHz. For an APU these are seriously 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.