Right on track, well after Ivy Bridge, AMD has released their second generation of Accelerated Processing Units in the form of the Trinity series A10-5800K and the A8-5600K. Last week, we brought you a preview of these two APUs just to give you a taste of their gaming performance and some of their specifications. Today, at Benchmark Reviews, we are going in detail for a full work-over of the A8-5600K APU.

Right on track, well after Ivy Bridge, AMD has released their second generation of Accelerated Processing Units in the form of the Trinity series A10-5800K and the A8-5600K. Last week, we brought you a preview of these two APUs just to give you a taste of their gaming performance and some of their specifications. Today, at Benchmark Reviews, we are going in detail for a full work-over of the A10-5800K APU.

Less than two days ago, Benchmark Reviews received the latest and greatest APUs from AMD; the A10-5800K and the A8-5600K. They don't launch in the retail market for a couple of weeks, but we are bringing you the low down in a special preview of the newest Accelerated Processing Units about to become available. The Second Generation APUs follow along the same lines as last year's APU releases by AMD with some notable upgrades in both CPU and GPU performance. The new "Trinity" series of APUs also comes with a new chipset and socket that are surprisingly not backwards compatible with the first generation "Llano" series of APUs.

Intel sticks to their "tick-tock" CPU development cycle, where the "ticks" represent new CPU architectures and the "tocks" represent process refinement. Sandy Bridge CPUs were the "tick", and the new Ivy Bridge CPUs are the "tock". Fabricated on a 22nm process with Intel's new low-leakage "3D" transistors, Ivy Bridge represents a fabrication breakthrough if nothing else. But how does it compare against the immensely popular and powerful Sandy Bridge CPUs? Benchmark Reviews dives into the fray to let you know.

Not quite a year after Intel released Sandy Bridge with the new LGA-1155 platform they upped the performance bar again. This time around, the Sandy Bridge-E LGA-2011 platform is bigger, faster, and represents the top-of-the-line for consumer computing. Intel "Extreme Edition" processors have always brought out the best that the company has to offer, but the Extreme moniker isn't limited to the performance. The price of Extreme Edition CPUs generally matches, with the highest end of these clocking in near $1000. The LGA-2011 platform offers a lot in terms of performance computing, besides just the Extreme Edition CPUs, though. You also get a full 40 PCI-E lanes and quad-channel memory compatibility. So what about those of us that don't need a $1000 CPU, but we still want to use three or four GPUs to their full potential? For that, we have the Intel i7-3820 3.6GHz CPU. In this article, Benchmark Reviews goes under the hood of the littlest Sandy Bridge-E processor.

Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs have always represented the company's top consumer offerings. Typically priced in the $1,000 range, they have unlocked multipliers, lots of cache, and lots of cores. But until now, Intel's top Extreme Edition offering, the Core i7-990X CPU, was based on the older Gulftown architecture, and the performance gap between this CPU and the newer Sandy Bridge architecture Core i7-2600K and 2700K is pretty damn narrow, especially considering that the latter costs less than a third the price of the former. But now Intel's made a Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, with six physical cores and a staggering 15 megabytes of cache. Benchmark Reviews takes the new Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU around the benchmark course, testing it against the best CPUs Intel and AMD have to offer.

The days when AMD processors ruled the performance roost are long gone, and most enthusiasts have forgotten they ever existed. But less than a decade ago, the Athlon X2 dual-core processor thoroughly spanked Intel's first crude dual-core efforts, which were simply two separate processor dies on one chip, communicating through the front-side bus, as opposed to AMD's much more advanced true dual-core CPUs. But AMD's been playing catch-up since then, and has been forced to compete on price rather than performance in desktop processors. Now Benchmark Reviews tests the high end of the new Bulldozer desktop CPU line, the multiplier-unlocked 8-core FX-8150 CPU.

When AMD merged with ATI in 2006, they immediately began working on combining discrete level graphics onto the die with an x86 CPU, thus forming an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). In 2009, AMD expanded on that effort by launching VISION with the intent of shaping the performance of a PC to fit the needs of the user. Five years after the merger, AMD's design has come to fruition in desktop form. In this article, Benchmark Reviews is taking a look at the AMD A-Series A8-3850 APU.