Speculation about a so-called Kaveri refresh has been flying out of the rumour mill for a good few months already. The premise derives from the assumption that AMD will do a similar thing to what it did with Trinity/Richland. That is, extend the marketable life of one generation of APU by releasing a refreshed version with faster clock speeds.
Kaveri refresh will reportedly hit the shelves around the Computex timeframe this year, that's early June, under the codename 'Godavari'. That codename is shared with the second-largest river in India - Kaveri, as it so happens, is the name of another large Indian river. AMD Godavari APUs will arrive on the same FM2+ socket as existing Kaveri APUs and from a physical level nothing changes, meaning the core counts for the CPU and GPU components remain identical.
The main difference between Godavari and Kaveri will come with respect to frequencies and thus performance. Godavari will apparently maintain the same TDPs as Kaveri but offer up to 20 per cent higher clock speeds. The source recently acquired details of the new Godavari flagship that is expected to be called the A10-8850K.
The A10-8850K is, for all intents and purposes, a faster A10-7850K. On the CPU side the base clock stays the same but the turbo clock is boosted by 0.1GHz, to 4.1GHz. The GPU gets the largest boost, rising from 720MHz to 856MHz - a 19 per cent increase. In our experience with the A10-7850K even the new 856MHz GPU core clock is conservative since 1,000MHz is readily attainable with overclocking.
The rest of the Godavari line-up reportedly includes the following models: A10-8750, A8-8650K, A8-8650, A6-8550K, Athlon X4 870K, Athlon X4 850, A10 Pro-8850B, A10 Pro-8750B, A8 Pro-8650B, A6 Pro-8550B and A4 Pro-8350B. All of the aforementioned APUs and CPUs will work with existing FM2+ motherboards after board vendors issue the relevant BIOS updates.
