Radeon HD 6450M 

Meanwhile based on this die shot Chipworks believes that the L2 cache has been reorganized to a per-core design, as there is no obvious single block of L2 on A8 like there was A7.

The final major identifiable block on A8 is once again the SRAM cache memory.

What those tweaks are remain to be seen as we would need to be able to benchmark the A8 in depth to even try to determine what Apple has changed, but for the moment it looks like we’re looking at an enhanced or otherwise significantly optimized version of Cyclone.

However this does strongly suggest that Apple has made some unknown revisions to Cyclone to further boost its single-threaded (Instruction Level Parallelism) performance.

In recent years this has especially been the case for laptop/mobile graphics thanks to the larger volume and higher levels of integration as found on those parts, though this does have the unfortunate side effect of meaning GPU announcements get caught up in the deluge of announcements coming out of CES.

Moving on to our second confirmed product, we have a new low end SKU called the R5 M230.

AMD’s Kaveri APUs would feature the latest core architecture along with enhanced GCN graphics on a single die package.

This means that higher frequency DDR3 memory just might come in handy with Kaveri APUs to unleash the full potential of the graphics core.