AMD drops the latest A10 APU with unlocked processor, Radeon graphics

By Matthew S. Smith Published May 27, 2015

amd drops the latest a10 apu with unlocked processor radeon graphics amda10 — AMD

AMD is revving up its latest processor, the AMD A10-7870K. This APU, which combines the company’s processor cores with an on-die Radeon GPU, is designed to provide balanced performance across a wide range of scenarios and deliver maximum value.

The processor portion of the 7870K consists of four CPU cores. These run at a maximum Turbo speed of 4.1GHz with a base clock of 3.9GHz, which means they should provide very consistent performance. The chip also boasts four megabytes of L2 cache. It’s unlocked too, so it can be overclocked with relative ease.

AMD

Recommended Videos

In the APU you’ll find eight GPU cores that run at a frequency of 866MHz. These support the latest DirectX 12 and AMD Mantle graphics APIs and are compatible with FreeSync, AMD’s frame synchronization technology. Virtual Screen Resolution, a technique that can increase game resolution beyond that of your monitor to add extra detail to scenes, is also available – though it’s hard to believe the feature will be of much use given the limited GPU power on tap.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming

Since this is a refresh rather than a major architecture update, the new chip will be supported by many previous FM2+ chipsets including the A88X, A78, 78H and A58. If you have one of these motherboards you may be able to drop in the 7870K as an upgrade after updating the BIOS. Check with your motherboard manufacturer to be sure.

As with previous APUs, AMD is positioning the new A10-7870K as a mid-range, do-it-all chip that provides significant bang for the buck. While not as quick as Intel processors in per-core performance, it is capable of playing games like Starcraft II, League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients at 30 FPS or better with detail at maximum and resolution set to 1080p.

That’s not bad given the $140 MSRP. A desktop Core i5 quad-core alone costs more than that. The Intel processor offers far more raw processing power, of course, but AMD’s A10-7870K could be a good alternative if you want to build a new gaming-capable rig on a very tight budget.

Topics

Matthew S. Smith

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Matthew S. Smith is the former Lead Editor, Reviews at Digital Trends. He previously guided the Products Team, which dives…

Computing

I tested AMD’s latest claims about Ryzen 9000, and they don’t hold up

The Ryzen 9 9950X between someone's fingertips.

AMD says that gaming performance on Ryzen 9000 is actually better than what you've read. As you can read in our Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X review, AMD's new Zen 5 CPUs are the best processors you can buy when it comes to productivity. Gaming performance, on the other hand, is disappointing.

According to a new blog post from AMD, there are a few reasons why reviewers saw lower gaming performance than expected. Chief among them are the fact that AMD used an unreleased version of Windows 11 -- the 24H2 update, which is available to Windows Insiders -- and that it used an administrator account for its "automated test methodology." In light of that, I downloaded the Windows update, spun up an admin account, and retested the Ryzen 9 9950X. And I'm not seeing what AMD claims at all.

Computing

AMD’s new integrated graphics just did something really impressive

A render of the new Ryzen AI 300 chip on a gradient background.

For years, any type of semi-serious gaming required having a discrete graphics card. While that's still the preferred way to do it, modern integrated GPUs can do quite a lot, as can be seen in this benchmark of the new AMD Radeon 890M. The GPU, bundled in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, may not give you Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra settings, but it can rival some of Nvidia's most popular discrete GPUs.

Of course, we're not talking about the likes of the RTX 4080 Super, but about cards from several generations ago. However, that doesn't make them any less popular in the Steam Hardware Survey. For example, Nvidia's GTX 1650 is the second-mostused GPU in the latest survey results, and it has been for some time -- and it also happens to be one of the cards that the Radeon 890M can keep up with.

Computing

AMD just revealed a game-changing feature for your graphics card

AMD is set to reveal a research paper about its technique for neural texture block compression at the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR) next week. It sounds like some technobabble, but the idea behind neural compression is pretty simple. AMD says it's using a neural network to compress the massive textures in games, which cuts down on both the download size of a game and its demands on your graphics card.

We've heard about similar tech before. Nvidia introduced a paper on Neural Texture Compression last year, and Intel followed up with a paper of its own that proposed an AI-driven level of detail (LoD) technique that could make models look more realistic from farther away. Nvidia's claims about Neural Texture Compression are particularly impressive, with the paper asserting that the technique can store 16 times the data in the same amount of space as traditional block-based compression.