AMD launched the second Kaveri refresh processor, this time updating the top of the line A8 APU. At the end of May, the company launched the A10-7870K, the first Kaveri refresh APU, which was marketed towards gamers on a budget. AMD has now launched a refreshed A8, the A8-7670K, which is an affordable APU geared more towards family or home office PCs.
The A8-7670K replaces the A8-7650K APU as the top product in the A8 series. This APU consists of 10 compute cores in total. Four of them are CPU cores, and the remaining six are GPU cores. These six GPU cores are designed using AMD's GCN technology, which is found in all of AMD's modern graphics processors, including those found in the current generation consoles from both Sony and Microsoft, and the latest GPUs such as the recently launched Fury cards.
The A8-7670K comes clocked slightly higher than the A8-7650K. The new APU comes from the factory at 3.6 GHz, with a max turbo clock of 3.9 GHz, while the previous chip ran at 3.3 GHz with a turbo clock of 3.8 GHz. The integrated Radeon R7 GCN cores have also seen a modest clock speed increase. The previous version runs at 720 MHz, while the GPU cores in the A8-7670K are set to 757 MHz.
The A8-7670K offers a quad-core processor and integrated graphics that AMD claimed are capable of playing some of the most popular games, such as Dota II and Counter-Strike: GO without the need for a discrete GPU. The company boasted that an A8-7670K on its own will outperform an Intel Pentium G3258 paired with an Nvidia GT 730 GPU. The APU is capable of even more GPU performance when paired with an R7 240 or R7 250 in Dual Graphics.
AMD claimed that the A8-7670K will outperform Intel's i3-4160 by over 200 percent in 3DMark, and slightly outpace it in PCMark8. When it comes to compute-heavy applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Premier, or the latest version of Blender that supports Open CL, AMD claimed to observe as much as 250 percent more performance over the competing i3 processor. The A8-7670K is also an unlocked processor, allowing users to push even more performance out of it if they desire.
The new A8 APU, like the rest of AMD's current APU lineup, accelerates a number of features found in Windows 10. Microsoft's new Edge browser, movie and TV playback, Bitlocker encryption functions, and the operating system's modern UI are all hardware accelerated by AMD's A8-7670K. The APU supports GameDVR, Xbox One streaming and DirectX 12. It also supports AMD Quick Stream technology, which gives more bandwidth to the applications with the highest priority.
Windows 10 driver model WDDM 2.0, which AMD said is required for DX12 certification, has the added benefit of making better use of AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), allowing for more efficient context switching between GPU and CPU cores.
AMD is positioning the A8-7670K as an upgrade for home office or family PCs. The company is aggressively pursuing a value proposition with the refreshed A8, pricing it at $117.99, which is two dollars lower than Intel's Core i3-4160 processors. The company also recommended pairing the A8-7670K with AMD 68H-based motherboards, which can be found for as little as $52. The new APU is available now from select e-tailers and system venders.
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