This week AMD has commercially launched its new APU, code named Kaveri, through references.

Initially planned to succeed the APU Trinity, the Kaveri chips have suffered some delay, forcing AMD to insert a Richland generation which was not really under the original program. So finally, the new APU are there and as announced at CES, AMD sells three of its Kaveri APUs, a few days after the official presentation.

A10-7850K, A10-7700K and A10-7600 are likely to recall by Steamroller x86 cores engraved in 28 nm, the successor to Piledriver APU Richland, whose fine engraving was 32 nm.

These three references also inaugurate the arrival of Graphic Core Next architecture of the Radeon HD 7000 in the APU, and the HSA (for Heterogeneous System Architecture), a process believed to improve communication between the graphics cores and x86 units.

AMD Kaveri APU

Know that Kaveri chips have a DSP TrueAudio and a PCIe Gen3 controller. Finally, these new standards are not compatible with motherboards FM2, and require FM2+ models.

All three APU in question have four x86 cores whose frequencies vary:
  1. from 3.1 to 3.8 GHz (via Turbo) for the A8-7600;
  2. from 3.5 to 3.8 GHz for the A10-7700K;
  3. from 3.7 to 4 GHz, finally, for the A10-7850K.

This last reference has a Radeon graphics part type R7 512 shipping computing units (divided in 8 GCN Compute Units involved Kaveri), against 384 units for the other two APU market. The clock frequency is about 720 MHz.

At the time of this writing, the A8-7600 is currently not available, including at the AMD website. The A10-7850K is in contrast to 165 euros on the Net, against €150 for the A10-7700K. Rates that rank just between Intel Core i5 and the Core i3 Haswell generation.