AMD Announce A10-7870K FM2+ APU

For a little while now we have been expecting the release of a new APU series from AMD; some places have been calling it Godavari, some as a Kaveri Refresh. We can now confirm some of the information previously leaked.

During a conference call with James Prior who is product manager client business unit at AMD, he supplied us with the information surrounding the upcoming release of the new A10-7870k APU. The A10-7870k will be a better version of the current A10-7850k, this has been achieved through production optimization for the chips and has enabled for a higher performance gain. The new processor series is called Kaveri Refresh, not Godavari like previously believed; the name Godavari was introduced as an internal code name, so not to get confused.

The A10-7870k is a more optimised version of the A10-7850K. We see a small CPU frequency increase of about 6%, but the major difference is in the graphics frequency, a huge 17% increase. It still features a range TDP of 95W and under, but it doesn’t feature configurable TDP due to maximizing performance over A10-7850k. 

This new APU is fully supported by all current FM2/ FM2+ motherboards. Some motherboards may require a BIOS update to fully accept the A10-7870K.

The direct competition is the Intel i3 4370 processor due to the almost comparable $150 price tag. You can see complete domination in the graphical testing

Even when the i3 is combined with a discrete graphics card, the price increases even more, but the A10-7870K is still more powerful.

When combined with an AMD R7 250 GDDR3 graphics card in hybrid crossfire, the performance is greatly increased.

AMD offer AMP enabled memory units, similar to that of Intel XMP memory units. When combined with the A10-7870K, the FPS increases, around double the performance when upgrading from single 1600MHz AMP memory module to dual 2400MHz AMP memory modules. The processor can support 2133MHz memory kits, with AMP AMD memory support that increases to 2400MHz memory kits.

AMD has recently introduced Virtual Screen Resolution on the R9 285 discrete graphics card. This feature essentially renders the image of a higher resolution screen and displays it on a lower resolution screen. Ideal for those who want 1080p detail on a lower resolution screen. Just like the AMD discrete graphics cards, this APU offers Freesync, zero performance penalty for smoother game play.

This is a new game, Ashes of the Singularity. This will be one of the first DirectX 12 games to be released later this year. What is being depicted is that everything in red is what is being rendered by the APU, everything else is rendered by the GPU.

There are set to be even more processors launched under the Kaveri Refresh code name, we can speculate that they will most likely be optimised versions of the current line up, so the A8-7650K will be replaced by the A8-7670K and so on. Are you excited for the new release? Do you currently use the FM2/ FM2+ platform and are looking for the best processor? Let us know in the comments.