Intel may have its 5th generation Core processors offering to kick off the year, however this isn’t stopping its competitor AMD from unveiling its new line of 7000 series APU and Radeon 300 series graphics to the public and OEM PC builders.
AMD’s new 7000 series APU, formerly codenamed “Carrizo-L” is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that delivers great mainstream desktop performance at an affordable price and rolling out globally in stages, the new APUs are more power efficient and comes with AMD’s powerful GPUs onboard which will allow some decent gaming without the need to invest a dedicated GPU.
The flagship mobile A8-7410 chip is a Quad-Core APU with a maximum clock base of 2.5GHz and has a mere maximum TDP of 25W, the chip will support 1866MHz DDR3 memory and has 2MB of L2 cache, graphics is managed by AMD’s Radeon R5 graphics which is able to take down Intel’s Atom and Core i3 processors in terms of performance.
On the other hand, the company’s top of the line desktop APU the A8-7850K is a 12-core (4CPU+8GPU) SoC with a really fast turbo frequency at 4.0GHz while its TDP is configurable from a range of 45W-95W, its Radeon M7 GPU will support DirectX 12, AMD Mantle and FreeSync, and customers will be able to purchase the chip at a mere $127, which gives 5th Gen Core processors a good run for its money in both performance and value.
AMD has also taken the opportunity to introduce the new Radeon M300 series mobile GPUs and the Radeon 300 series desktop GPUs for OEM desktops, the new graphics chip will offer unprecedented performance with the company’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture and have full support for DirectX 12 which will be available on Windows 10, AMD however has yet to reveal its GPU offerings for DIY PC builders.
This will be an interesting quarter as both AMD and Intel are set to release new processors for users and AMD’s APU processors does seem to offer some serious performance for users who are looking to build affordable PCs, next thing that we need to know is that how the APUs will perform in benchmarks to judge its worthiness.
