Kaveri A10 and A8, AMD’s first HSA chips, are finally out. We saw Kaveri in action in Vegas and we saw a few things that it can do. It is a 245 square mm chip with 2.41 billion transistors manufactured in GlobalFoundries’ 28nm SHP super high performance processes.

If has new multithreaded Steamroller CPU core that should deliver up to 10 percent more CPU performance over the last generation and it is based on Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, promising even faster gaming on a budget. The A10 comes with four Steamroller cores and 8 GCN graphics units and AMD calls it a “12 compute unit” APU which is more marketing than reality. However, it’s not all marketing talk – Kaveri has quite a few things going for it.

A massive 47 percent of this 245 square millimetre chip is dedicated to graphics and the GPU has elements found on the latest generation Hawaii chip including GCN architecture, AMD TrueAudio technology, AMD Eyefinity technology and UVD 4 & Video Coding Engine 2 support. AMD claims that 35 percent of Steam gamers use graphics slower than A10 7850K.

Kaveri comes with configurable TDP and if you want, you can automatically set that your 95W A10 7850 to work as a 45W part, naturally at lower clocks. Kaveri at 45W can score 1287 in PCMark 8 v2 Work Test, while the Richland based 45W part scores 735. Kaveri scores 75+ percent more, which is impressive.

 

Two parts are shipping in January, the $173 priced A10 7850K and A10 7700K priced at $152. The kicker is that both parts are shipping with a Battlefield 4 bundle, adding $59.99 of value. This definitely spices up AMD’s new secret sauce.

A10 7850K is a 95W TPD quad-core clocked at 3.7GHz with a maximum Turbo frequency of 4GHz. It has 8 GCN GPU modules (512 GCN cores) clocked at 720MHz while the A10 7700K, another 95W TDP part, has four CPU cores and six GPU units clocked at 720MHz. The 7700K CPU stock clock is 3.4GHz and it can hit 3.7 GHz with Turbo. Both parts are already shipping with the Battlefield 4 bundle.

 

The A8 7600 a 65/45W TDP part priced at a rather attractive $119, but it will ship later in Q1. This CPU has four possible clocks. As 45W its default clock is 3.1GHz and turbo to 3.3GHz while at 65W it starts at 3.3GHz and it stops at 3.8GHz on Turbo. In both cases the GPU works at 720 MHz and there is no Turbo option for the GPU.

 

The A10 7850K will run a list of 18 games at 1080p and here is the official list. For casual gamers, this APU sounds like a very good start.  Kaveri A10 chips are available in Germany and the UK, priced at close to €152 for A10 7850K and €135 for the A10 7700K.