AMD A10-7800 Kaveri APU Benchmarked Against A10-6800K
Before showing the numbers, let’s talk about the APUs themselves which are going to be launched two weeks from now. The AMD A10-7850K is
the flagship Kaveri APU for 2014 which would replace the Richland
A10-6800K APU. The A10-7850K has four Steamroller cores and 512
GCN stream processors which bring its performance on a level
equivalent to the Radeon HD 7750 in terms of graphics performance. The
A10-7850K has a max compute of 856 GFLops (GPU + CPU) compared to 779
GFlops on the Richland A10-6800K APU.
The clock speed of the APU is maintained at 3.7 GHz which is
presumably the base clock while Turbo clock would push the speeds beyond
4 GHz barrier. The GPU which is positioned in the R7 2**D series is
clocked at 720 MHz while the APU itself has 4 MB of L2 cache. The GCN
graphics die would feature 8 GPU cores which represent a total of
512 stream processors. The TDP for the A10-7850K would be set at 95W.
AMD A10-7850K will support both Mantle API, DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL 4.3
and feature dual graphics functionality with the AMD’s Cape Verde based discrete GPUs.
Next up, we have
the A10-7700K which is another unlocked chip featuring the Steamroller
core architecture with a max boost clock of 3.8 GHz and base clock of
3.5 GHz. It features 4 MB of L2 cache plus HSA features and True Audio
technology support. The GPU side ships with a GCN graphics die featuring
6 shader units equaling to a total of 384 Stream processors clocked at
720 MHz. The A10-7700K features a TDP of 95W so we may see one Kaveri
APU part based on the A8 series which would feature a TDP of 65W.
Now we come to the new SKU details starting with the A10-7800 (Non-K)
which has 4 cores clocked at 3.5 GHz base and 3.9 GHz turbo while the
graphics side would be equipped with 8 GCN compute units resulting in
512 Stream processors which would be clocked at 654 MHz base and 720 MHz
boost. The APU would feature a 65 Watt TDP but won’t support any kind
of overclocking due to the locked multiplier.
AMD A10-7850K and A10-7700K Specifications:
| Model |
AMD A10-7850K ‘Kaveri’ |
AMD A10-7700K ‘Kaveri’ |
AMD A10-7800 ‘Kaveri’ |
AMD A10-6800K ‘Richland’ |
| Cores |
4/4 |
4/4 |
4/4 |
4/4 |
| Turbo Core 3.0 |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Base Clock |
3.7 GHz |
3.5 GHz |
3.5 GHz |
4.1 GHz |
| Turbo Clock |
4.0 GHz |
3.8 GHz |
3.9 GHz |
4.4 GHz |
| L2 Cache |
4 MB L2 |
4 MB L2 |
4 MB L2 |
4 MB L2 |
| Unlocked Design |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| Graphics Core |
GCN Radeon R7 |
GCN Radeon R7 |
GCN Radeon R7 |
HD 8000 |
| GPU Cores |
512 Cores |
384 Cores |
512 Cores |
384 Cores |
| GPU Clock |
720 MHz |
720 MHz |
720 MHz |
844 MHz |
| TDP |
95W |
95W |
65W |
100W |
| Price |
>$150 US |
<$150 US |
TBA |
$149 US |
| Launch Date |
14th January 2014 |
14th January 2014 |
14th January 2014 |
4th June 2013 |
Alright, with the specifications mentioned now we get on with the
interesting part. From the benchmarks shown, it can clearly be seen that
the Kaveri A10-7800 is clearly ahead of the A10-6800K in clock-to-clock
performance so the SteamrollerB cores do have some nice IPC improvement
on their end but not quite as much as expected.
What surprised me here is that the graphics performance isn’t as
great as i expected with A10-7800 being a 3-5% faster than the VLIW4 iGP
based A10-6800K in gaming benchmarks even though it features 512 GCN
cores against the 384 VLIW4 cores of its predecessor. With an added HD
7750 which enables Dual Graphics, the core performance leverages by a
ton and i believe the chip would also be compatible with several R7
series graphics cards such as the R7 255, R7 260 and R7 260X although
that remains to be confirmed.
The graphics performance could be slow since AMD has yet to launch a
Catalyst Driver suite that is officially aimed to optimize the graphics
performance of their Kaveri APUs and would only be available at launch
so i am expecting some improvements that would atleast give the IGP a
5-10% boost over Richland. You can see the benchmarks below along with
test setup and power consumption of the chip which is 10W lower than the
Richland setup.
AMD Kaveri A10-7800 vs A10-6800K Benchmarks:
