AMD A10-7870K Godavari APU Review
AMD Introduces The A10-7870K Kaveri APU
Back on May 28th, 2015 AMD introduced the new A10-7870K Accelerated Processing Units (APU) as part of the Kaveri refresh. Legit Reviews just got our hands on the AMD A10-7870K APU and it’s our first ‘new’ APU that we’ve been able to test since our Kaveri launch article in July 2014 that featured the A10-7800 and A8-7600 APU’s. When it comes to the architecture there really aren’t any changes as it’s using the same Kaveri CPU core with Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) and Radeon R7 graphics with the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. AMD is releasing this new processor to help booster is aimed at the home office family PC market that just in time for system builders and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) PC market to hopefully build a new PC for the upcoming Microsoft Windows 10 launch.
Kaveri APUs feature up to 12 Compute Cores (4 CPU + 8 GPU) and the number of CPUs and GPUs will vary depending on which A-Series APU you are looking at getting. The four CPU cores use the AMD Steamroller microarchitecture and the 8 GPU cores feature Graphics Core Next (GNC) technology with Mantle and TruseAudio functionality. Being designed with HSA from the get go allows the CPU and GPU to work together in harmony by quickly dividing and directing tasks to the appropriate cores for new levels of performance and efficiency for desktop and notebook PCs, enabling a new era of compute capabilities with compute cores So, you have the latest latest technology features that AMD has to offer inside a desktop processor for AMD FM2+ platforms (AMD A88X, A78 and A58 Chipset based motherboards).
The AMD A10-7870K APU features 12 compute cores (4 CPU + 8 GPU), with the CPUs running at a 3.9 GHz base clock and a 4.1 GHz Turbo clock and and GPU cores running at 866MHz. The Despite the higher clock speeds than the AMD A10-7850K, the AMD A10-7870K has the same 95W TDP rating. On top of the new higher clock speeds we also find that the AMD Kaveri APUs have all been reduced in price. The new AMD 10-7870K APU has a suggested retail price of $137 although street pricing has it at $149.99 right now.
AMD Kaveri APU Pricing:
- AMD A10-7870K APU (Up to 4.1GHz): $149.99 Shipped
- AMD A10-7850K APU (Up To 3.7GHz): $129.49 Shipped
- AMD A10-7800 APU (Up To 3.9GHz): $124.99 Shipped
- AMD A10-7700K APU (Up to 3.8GHz): $119.99 Shipped.
Here is a look at the AMD A10-7870K Kaveri Refresh (aka Godavari) APU. On the Integrated Heat Spreader (IHS) you’ll find the model model number, manufacturer date, batch number and where it was made. This particular AMD A10-7870K APU was made on week 13 of 2015 in Malaysia.
The AMD A10-7870K APU has four CPU cores and eight active GPU cores (512 stream processors since each GPU has 64 shaders), which make this a fully enabled processor and it has unlocked multipliers. The A10-7870K APU has a base CPU frequency of 3.9 GHz and max Turbo Core frequency of 4.1 GHz. When the processor is an idle it runs at 1.7 GHz as the multiplier drops down to 17 and the core voltage lowers to help save power when the system is not being actively used. The CPU-Z screenshots above show the AMD A10-7870K in both an idle and single thread load state to show the low and high clocks of this processor.
Flipping the processors over you can see that the pins that make up this FM2+ socketed processor. There are 904 pins on a FM2+ socket for those that are curious.
Let’s take a look at how the AMD A10-7870K APU performs in our AMD A88X test platform!