AMD A10-6700 And A10-6800K Review: Richland Hits The Desktop

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Richland, code name for AMD's highest-end APUs, finds its way into our lab in the form of A10-6700 and A10-6800K. Based on the Piledriver architecture and VLIW4 graphics, these chips are slight improvements to Trinity. Can they outshine Core i3, though?

Results: Productivity

Our Acrobat benchmark involves exporting a PowerPoint presentation to PDF format. It's the last single-threaded test in our suite.

Not surprisingly, the Core i3 ends up on top. The APUs aren't far behind, at least.

On the other hand, a well-threaded application like 3ds Max gives each A10 APU an opportunity to stretch its legs. The four integer cores you get from two Piledriver modules outmode the best efforts of two Hyper-Threaded Ivy Bridge cores.

Blender puts the Core i3-3220 and A10-6800K on equal footing, with the other APUs slightly behind.

FineReader is also well-threaded, which is why AMD's quad-core APUs manage to eke out a win, despite lower per-core performance.

Despite the threaded nature of our Visual Studio test, Intel's Core i3-3220 scores a first-place finish. The two APUs finish a couple of minutes behind. Clearly, something else is bottlenecking AMD's processors.

Don Woligroski
97 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Novuake
    VLIW4... Are you kidding me??? WHen is that gonna be scrapped...
    Reply
  • esrever
    Numbering has never been for the architecture inside the chips. They have always been marketing for the current line of products. Normal people buy a laptop, they see the number, they get the performance associated with said number and they don't care about the inside of the chip. Richland is just a trinity refresh with better power management and higher clocks.
    Reply
  • griptwister
    AMD, Good show! Now, release Kaveri Already! I need a new SteamRoller CPU!
    Reply
  • tului
    They say it's VLIW4 then say it's GCN. They can't be both can they?
    Reply
  • songorocosongo
    The 6800k is good, but I expected it to be a little more powerful.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    No temps with power metrics page? 8(
    I guess Richland is still very hot going by the power figures alone. Still, it's a good step up (and stop gap) for AMD.
    Nice review still. Are you guys planning on a follow up for Dual Graphics? 8)
    Cheers!
    Reply
  • kfronda26
    This is dumb. Still 6670 max card for dual graphics. Disappointing.
    Reply
  • Wes Young
    10920935 said:
    This is dumb. Still 6670 max card for dual graphics. Disappointing.

    No, since driver 13.1 even the 5800k was able to run dual graphics with a HD 7750. I am typing on a system with that exact setup right now. I am not sure if the 6800k will allow anything above the 7750 though. When I tried a 7770 with the 5800k I wasn't given the option to enable dual graphics.
    Reply
  • unknown9122
    AMD swings and misses once again.
    Reply
  • unknown9122
    AMD swings and misses once again.
    Reply