News AMD announces first Richland APU parts

"the Richland APUs are claimed to offer a 20 to 40 per cent boost in performance over current-generation APU products"

Presumably they're referring to graphics performance.?

Whilst improvement to gaming performance is welcome, CPU performance is where these chips will still be lacking compared to Intel, IPC per core will no doubt still be as second rate as the desktop parts.

 

From what I understand the new Richland APU will have ever more refined graphics core, better memory controller (I guess some one is listening), better energy efficiency and best of all you can pair it up with different architectural generations for Crossfire.

This is like the 2013 version of current APU. Couple tweaks, some mods and hopefully it should hold us off til Kaveri comes at the end of the year.

I don't think this will send hordes of people for an upgrade but any one buying soon will still keep the APU in mind. As we all know Haswell is due this June, Richland is a beefed up better competitor for Haswell to face till the end of the year.

 

I am keeping an eye on Richland but seeing as my problem with the A10-5800K is mainly CPU bound (emulators) I think I will hold off for Kaveri.

 

And here I thought the might actually do something useful like up the stream cores to IDK 500 this is basically the same amount of iGP power as before.

AMD really need to focus on what they do best low cost alternatives. with more stream cores they would really have a contender for general purpose gaming PCs. Either that or return to handcrafted CPU designs and give Intel a run for the money again. This makes me sad I really wish they would invest more in R&D.