AMD Introduces A10-7870K APU With Virtual Screen Resolution Support

AMD has announced the first apu in a series of Kaveri refreshes: the A10-7870K. The A10-7870K has slightly higher clock speeds than the A10-7850K and the APU offers support for ‘virtual screen resolution’.

The A10-7870K is the first of the apus under the name Godavari that AMD is working on. There are also models in the 8000 series for OEMs, but despite the different naming, those models for system builders are the same apu. The A10-7870K is a Kaveri apu that hardly differs from previous models; it is produced at 28nm and can handle A88X, A78, A68H and A58 chipsets for socket FM2 and FM2+. There is also nothing new when it comes to cores and GPU architecture; it has 12 compute cores: 4 cpu cores and 8 gpu cores.

However, with its clock speed of 3.9GHz, the A10-7870K runs 100MHz faster than its predecessor A10-7850K and the turbo is 4.1GHz, compared to 4GHz for the A10-7850K. The GPU is also tuned slightly more aggressively with 866MHz than the predecessor with 720MHz.

In addition to support for Freesync, there is technology that AMD calls ‘virtual screen resolution’. This is very similar to what the company previously called “virtual super resolution,” but at lower resolutions. Images are rendered at a higher resolution and then downscaled to the displayed resolution. This would make more detail visible.

Finally, AMD points to the arrival of the ‘multiadapter asymmetric rendering’ technology with DirectX 12 and Mantle. Now a Radeon R7 card is needed for Dual Graphics, but with the multiadapter option, the A10-7870K can be combined with an R9 290X for better gaming performance.

The A10-7870K is available immediately for a suggested retail price of $137. That is converted to 125 euros, but it is not known whether that will be the actual euro price.