AMD Richland (Expected 19th March, 2013)

Product: APU (CPU with a good iGPU)

Expected price: No data, but probably $60-$120 range, based on Llano and Trinity prices

Richland will be AMD’s third mainstream APU family, an improvement over Trinity. Since prices and performance have not yet been revealed, we can only speculate and extrapolate from previous AMD launches. Llano was not a good buy at launch, since the price for a Llano CPU was the same as getting a CPU and low-end graphics card. It was only after Llano’s cheapest CPU were released that Llano became a logical purchase. Trinity was an improvement in terms of performance, but it was on a different socket, so it did not help prices. Richland is expected to be on the same FM2 socket as Trinity, so that ought to encourage AMD to lower Trinity prices.

So what do the rumours say? The “reported” leaks are that AMD is releasing 6 CPUs, but different reports say that Richland is based on either Piledriver or Steamroller cores. Given that Trinity was released long before Vishera (mobile Trinity was out 5 months earlier), it is possible that we will see Steamroller in an APU form first. It is more likely that Richland will still use Piledriver cores though, since most sources (not rumours) support that, and Steamroller is eons away. Some reports state that Richland will still use Northern Island based shaders, but we lean towards the other rumours that it will use Southern Island shaders.

At best, Richland will be launched with a great price, its CPU performance will be better than the Phenom II, and its iGPU can perform as good as a 7750. At worst, it will have the same launch price as Trinity and Llano before it, and it will not perform better than a 6670. Even in this worst case scenario, Richland can still do some good, by lowering the prices of Trinity CPUs to be more reasonable. The expected launch date is on the 19th of March, just 2 weeks away, and we are definitely waiting to see official benchmarks and prices.

You can read more about the Antec GX700: What we are waiting for, part 1

Sources: [tomshardware] [techpowerup] [amd] [gamingio]

Images: [AMD official page]