Today, AMD is launching a new A10 APU and officially shipping the long-awaited A8-7600. While both of these products are based on existing technology, they come equipped with price cuts and segmentation decisions that change the APU's competitive equation in some very effective ways. Let's take a look at the new product stack:
First up, we've got the new A10-7800, with the same CPU and GPU technology as the A10-7850K, but a slightly lower Turbo frequency and baseline clock. Those drops come along with a hefty cut to TDP; the A10-7800 is a 65W part by default but can fit into the 45W frequency target through AMD's configurable TDP option.
This small frequency cut (5% on base, and about 2% at Turbo) is accompanied by an 11% price cut, which makes the A10-7800 a better deal all the way around -- particularly for buyers who want small form factor systems or mini-towers. It's the A8-7600, however, which is really the star of the show.
When AMD announced the A8-7600 -- an awfully long time ago now -- it declared that the chip would initially be available for $119. Instead, the same core will be dropping in at just $105. Let's take a look at how that compares to AMD's other lower-end chips.
If you only need a CPU core or don't care about power consumption, then there are other AMD offerings that may interest you more, including an A8-6600K (unlocked Richland, 3.9GHz base clock, $99). For buyers who want to balance clock speed, GPU performance, and power consumption, however, the A8-7600 will be a nice replacement for the A8-6500 (65W, 3.5GHz base, 256 GPU cores). At 65W, the A8-7600 should match the A8-6500 in CPU performance while outperforming it in GPU tests thanks to its larger number of cores (384 vs. 256).
The $77 dual-core A6 -7400K isn't something we can realistically recommend -- two AMD CPU cores are approximately equal to one Intel core, and the extremely overclockable Pentium G3258 is just $72. The 3.9GHz Turbo clock speed is interesting, but even if that chip could hit 5GHz (and GF's 28nm bulk silicon would never permit such frequency jumps) it'd still get crushed by an Intel Pentium at 3.5GHz. AMD is positioning the A6-7400K as an HSA-capable CPU, but HSA simply isn't mature enough for that to be an effective selling point.
GrassFX: Using the integrated GPU as a coprocessor
AMD has also released a new benchmark demo with what it's calling GrassFX. This is actually an evolved form of TressFX and it offloads some of the physics calculations directly to the integrated GPU, while the discrete GPU handles the rest of the rendering pipeline. This task is handled differently from conventional Dual Graphics; the game engine is passing physics calculations, not rendering data.
This is an interesting capability, but we're not sold on its long-term usefulness. The reason is simple -- AMD is already trying to launch one major API, Mantle. Pushing a second, even more specialized option like integrated GPU offload is a feature that requires both an AMD APU and an AMD GPU.
Don't get me wrong -- I actually really like the idea of this kind of hand-off capability and it makes a great deal of sense for AMD -- but I'm not sure AMD commands enough market share to drive adoption, particularly given that Mantle is an uphill battle all its own.
One added benefit to buying an APU now, at least an A10-class APU, is that AMD is offering a free game -- from August to October, buyers of an A10 will receive either Thief, Sniper Elite III, or Murdered: Soul Suspect (your choice).
AMD's HSA 2.0, explained
Iterative improvements and a big boost for HSA
These launches, price cuts, and power consumption improvements don't fundamentally change the Kaveri-Haswell competitive situation, but they're important for other reasons. First, they improve AMD's market position in low power modes. A number of manufacturers have been pushing all-in-one solutions of late (HP has several AIO systems based on AMD chips) and anything that gives the company a better set of low power options is important.
The other advantage is that these new products will help push HSA farther down the stack. Up until now, HSA support has been confined to two processors -- the A10-7850K and the A10-7700K, both of which were relatively expensive. The widespread availability of the A8-7600 will help rectify that, bringing the capability to a new generation of systems.
By this time next year, mobile Kaveri and the introduction of Project Skybridge will put AMD's entire product stack on HSA-capable silicon -- and that's vital to Sunnyvale's long-term interests.
