AMD launches 2013 A-Series desktop APU platform

New chips target mainstream desktops

AMD has lifted the lid on its latest desktop platform with A-Series accelerated processing unit (APU) chips, offering a performance boost over its earlier top-end platform, despite using the existing Piledriver cores.

Announced on Wednesday, the 2013 A-Series desktop platform, codenamed Richland, delivers four CPU cores in combination with up to 384 Radeon HD 8000 GPU cores, and supports clock speeds up to 4.4GHz.

Aimed at mainstream PCs, the Richland A-Series chips are the desktop versions of the Temash, Kabini and Richland mobile chips that AMD shipped in May.

Like the mobile Richland chips, the desktop version is based on the older Piledriver CPU architecture rather than the latest Jaguar cores used in Temash and Kabini.

However, these have been tweaked with enhanced Turbo Core technology and other changes that allow the cores to perform more efficiently, achieving nine percent more multi-threading performance than previous generations at the same clock speed, AMD said.

AMD said the A10 versions of the new chips are being positioned against Intel's Core i5, with the A8 going up against Core i3, while the A6 and A4 compete with the Pentium and Celeron chips.

The top-end chip is the A10-6800K, which has a base clock speed of 4.1GHz and 384 Radeon cores, while the A8-6600K is clocked at 3.7GHz and has 256 Radeon cores.