AMD A10-5800K review

AMD A10 Review- Under the hood

Trinity doesn't offer anything by way of a smaller manufacturing process - like Llano, AMD is still dealing with 32nm here while Intel's new Ivy Bridge CPUs, which now stretch all the way down to the sub-£100 price bracket, feature 22nm technology. It's what's under the hood that AMD hopes will allow it to keep the pressure on Intel that Llano has been applying for the last 15 months.


A revamped X86 architecture is something that Trinity desperately needs over Llano - the latter wasn't a slouch but Intel's dominance outside of gaming was clear. A8 and A10 APUs will feature two dual-core modules, each with 2MB L2 cache (4MB in total) while A6 and A4 APUs are dual-core. Clock speeds have seen a healthy increase over Llano - even if we're talking about similar clock-for-clock performance to Llano, with the A10-5800K offering a Turbo frequency of 4.2GHz compared to the A8-3870K's 3GHz, it's clear on the x86 side of things, the A10-5800K should prove more potent.


However we're hoping that the introduction of AMD's Piledriver cores into its APUs will mean further improvements, following AMD's second take on the ill-fated Bulldozer architecture, with many improvements being implemented into Piledriver, not least of all better power efficiency - key for any product aiming at this end of the market. In addition, AMD has cited Branch Prediction and cache improvements over Bulldozer, to further cement its argument that Trinity boasts superior X86 performance to Llano - just as well, with Ivy Bridge Pentiums and Core-i3s having hit the shelves recently.

The Northern Islands-based AMD Radeon HD 7660D GPU that's included with the AMD A10-5800K sports a GPU core frequency of 800MHz and 384 shaders, with the memory obviously tying into the system RAM. For this reason, both Trinity and Llano potentially benefit from using faster than the average 1,600MHz memory, which is akin to overclocking the GPU's memory. However, as you break the 1,600MHz barrier, the costs will likely outweigh the gains but we'll be looking at this in more detail in the benchmarks and in a future article.


The A55 and A75 chipsets have migrated to the new CPU socket, but we also have a newcomer in the form of the A85X chipset. With it comes CrossFire X support in a two x8 PCI-E lane configuration, and eight native SATA 6Gbps ports.