AMD A8 5600K review - Introduction

Trinity Desktop APUs - the A8 5600K

You've probably just read our A10 review, well .. there's more as we are also testing the A8 5600K APU from AMD. The little brother of the A10-5800K has slightly slower clock frequencies and a hint less shader processors harbored in it's IGP. Still this Trinity APU will pack heaps of features that make it very interesting for the entry level PC market. Heck these babies make truly excellent HTPCs as well.

So -- back in May AMD introduced a series of AMD A10 'Trinity' APUs for mobile and notebook solutions. The new APU series is based on a new architecture that should bring it's 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 and Trinity will thus be the successor of the current  AMD A4, A6 en 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. That means you are  looking at reasonable up-to okay CPU performance versus a greatly enhanced integrated GPU, and all that for very interesting prices. Today's tested is the A10 5800K APU for example will cost roughly 125 EUR.

Based on the Trinity APU architecture there will be several APU models to be found which we'll place in an overview later on.

Our tested model is the A8-5600K APU is rated at 100W running at 3.6 GHz with a Turbo allowance towards 3900 MHz. The A8 APUs have a 4MB L2 cache and pack 256 Radeon (shader) cores with that embedded GPU running at 760 MHz.

By itself not a massive GPU change opposed to the previous generation more shader cores however the new AMD graphics architecture is applied and offers a significant leap in performance for integrated graphics alright. Processor wise Trinity is based on Piledriver cores, basically 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 wanted to quickly talk about the architecture and the technology behind it. Next page please.