A recent market study conducted by Mercury Research has shown that APUs take up more than 70% of the total number of processors sold by AMD in the third quarter of 2012, which clearly showcases the success of the Trinity platform. While AMD is constantly trying to keep up with the general pace in the processor market, APUs are removed from this equation. APU is simply a story for itself and no other company is even close to offering something similar. When you take into consideration the fact that these are great products on their own, everything becomes as clear as a bell. APU is something that AMD should and needs to focus on, which is exactly what they’re doing. A large number of models with all sorts of purposes have been presented, with a sufficiently broad gamma for everyone. The latest addition to the fold carries the name A10-5700 and represents a power-saving model that doesn’t sacrifice much of the performance sported by the flagship 5800K.

A lot of power in 65 W

A10-5700 has remarkably similar specs to its more powerful brother. In fact, the differences are so small that one could easily wonder if there’s any point to offering such similar two APUs. The new model has a quad-core CPU, i.e. two modules with two ALI and one FPU unit each. These are accompanied by the integrated Radeon HD 7660D, the GPU of which contains 384 stream processors, 24 texture and 8 ROP units. The GPU is based on VLIW4 architecture, already familiar from the Cayman chip, i.e. the Radeon HD 6900 series. This chip supports DirectX 11, Shader Model 5.0, OpenGL 4.2 etc. Even more importantly, the integrated GPU takes over acceleration in the case that software support for OpenCL is there. All in all, this FM2 APU looks pretty much identical to the other A10 model.

The clock is the only thing that stands in the way, but it’s clear that this difference is artificial, since AMD had to distinguish the two in some way in order to differentiate prices. The APU works at 3.4 GHz, with Turbo boosting the number up to 4 GHz, whereas the graphics chip is set to 760 MHz instead of 800 MHz. Can that be all? Indeed it can, and the result, obviously, is almost identical performance in practical terms. You may have noticed the lack of the K-suffix, which means that there’s no option to increase the multiplier of this APU. This is definitely something that’s going to bother enthusiasts, as it’s bound to limit their creativity a great deal during overclocking. Luckily, enthusiasts aren’t AMD’s target market for this APU. In fact, power consciousness and efficiency are the real advantages A10-5700 has to offer. The specs list a consumption of merely 65 W, which is 30 W less than 5800K, with a difference in performance of about 10%. Unfortunately, raw specs aren’t as realistic as we hoped they would be, since the claimed TDP value refers to the maximum difference, with the average one being much lower. It seems that this value is in fact closer to 10%, which means that A10-5700 is about as less demanding as it’s slower. The lack of a multiplier increase option seems even more limiting in this regard.

Finally, we can only commend AMD for trying to cater to all user profiles. However, since the prices are marginally different between the two aforementioned models, we’d still advise you to opt for 5800K, since it provides reasonable overclock options. This is only valid, of course, if you’re not a lucky owner of a motherboard with the ability of unlocking the multiplier (Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4, anyone?).