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AMD Next-Gen Kaveri APU Shipments Slip To 2014
MojoKid writes "The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that AMD's 3rd generation APU won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the beginning of the fourth quarter. What the company is saying now is that while Kaveri will ship to manufacturers in late 2013, it won't actually hit shelves until 2014. The reason Kaveri was late taping out, according to sources, was that AMD kept the chip back to put some additional polish on its performance. Unlike Piledriver, which we knew would be a minor tweak to the core Bulldozer architecture, Steamroller, Kaveri's core architecture, is the first serious overhaul to that hardware. That means it's AMD's first chance to really fix things. Piledriver delivered improved clock speeds and power consumption, but CPU efficiency barely budged compared to 'Dozer. Steamroller needs to deliver on that front."
Steamroller FX chips aren't even on the roadmap at this time. That doesn't mean that they will never come, but AMD is clearly prioritizing their APUs over enthusiast-oriented chips at this time.
I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips.
Missed the newest Haswell line, eh?
The thing is, nobody is buying AMD because they are the best of the best. Their most expensive (non-server) chip is only $200. People buying their stuff aren't looking for the latest greatest thing. They just want a computer that performs reasonably well, without breaking the bank. The fact that you can get an 8 core, 4 GHz CPU for $200 is a big plus for some people. Plus AMD motherboards seem to have more features for less money. And they have a better track record for not switching sockets every time they change something, which leaves more room for upgrading your machine later.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
AMD and to a lesser extent, Intel, are misreading the mass market. What everybody else except those hardcore GamerZ (rhymes with lamers) want isn't more "powerful" desktop systems that consume enough watts to power a third world household with room to spare but more power efficient APUs, aka SoCs or systems on a chip. I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips.
How has Intel misread the market? Ivy Bridge was Sandy Bridge with much lower load power. Haswell is Ivy Bridge with much lower idle power. True, Intel is still struggling to compete in the smartphone/tablet segment that is dominated by ARM, but Haswell is far superior to past Intel chips when it comes to power consumption.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The AMD APUs really are a great melding of price vs performance. Sure Intel has faster CPUs, but they're also more than twice as much! The highest end APU is $150, and the highest i7 is $340. The i7 will have higher CPU performance, but most games aren't CPU bound, they're GPU bound. The AMD APUs have decent GPUs. They won't replace your high end GPU if you're playing Battlefield at 1080p, but if you're a mid-level gamer they perform great. Plus you can always add a decent GPU for $150 and you're still less than that 4700 i7!
The fact that you can get an 8 core, 4 GHz CPU for $200 is a big plus for some people.
I guess, for the people who like big numbers never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC. The FX-8350 has a single threaded performance equal to the Phenom II X6 1100T and Intel Pentium G840, it can win some multi-threaded tests because price wise it competes against Intel's hyperthreading-crippled processors but it's no impressive chip. But at least it sucks less than the FX-8150 , which really was the worst of Bulldozer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I would love to see what these chips do for engineering simulations. In simulation software there is a lot of back and forth between parts that can be done on a gpu for a huge performance gain to parts that work best on a cpu. The problem is that mostly you end up running them pure cpu only because the overhead of handing off to the gpu and getting a result back is so high. Kaveri is the first chip I know of that can do a zero copy transfer between the gpu and cpu. It may not be great for all apps but it should be AMAZING for engineering sims if they are modified to take advantage of it.
Some of the papers I read found that on simulations large enough for the gpu to make a difference you could get a 50x performance increase and theoretically it should have been around 200x or so but the overhead of loading and retrieving the data was still very large.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC.
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
But in any event, I think the really important point is in the end of this article - http://hothardware.com/News/Praying-For-Consoles-AMD-Details-2013-Game-Plan-Offers-Updates-on-New-APU-Performance/ - AMD is banking its future on the APUs in embedded applications, low end laptops, and consoles. Unless they get into tablets and mobile devices in big ways, I think they're planning to grow their share of a market that's shrinking rapidly. "King of console processors" is meaningless if 90% of the demographic that played Xbox360 in 2005 is playing on an iPad in 2020.
So basically, you havent looked at Intel CPUs of the past 2 years at all, right?
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
Intel CPU prices were higher when AMD was competitive with them.
ARM are Intel's real competitor at the moment, not AMD.
The AMD APUs really are a great melding of price vs performance....
Even though I loath the 70% gross margin that Intel insists on. They have http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5MTI 20-30 people working on Linux Drivers vs 5 from AMD. There is more than one way to measure bang for buck. That said when I buy a separate graphics card it will be AMD.
ARM is a threat to Intel in the near future and indirectly. People are gravitating towards tablets and smartphones instead of buying deaktops. However, those of us that actually need desktops today have only Intel and AMD to turn to, and Intel's margins are too high and their products are too artificially crippled for my tastes, which is why I sincerely root for AMD's success.
AMD hardware is what's backing up the XBOne, PS4, and WiiU. I'm sure they have plenty of customers.
FX-8350 is 180$, I just bought one. That is, the price difference is 20%, but the comparable motherboard was about 40$ cheaper with AMD. In the 180-220$ range of processors, 75$ is nothing to sneeze at.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
See: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaveri
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I guess, for the people who like big numbers never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC.
If by "breaking even" you mean pretty much beating the similarly priced intel processor on every multithreaded task, and even beating the $$$ top end intel i7 on some then yes.
A good fraction of what I do requires more than one core these days. In things like parallel compiling, I believe that the top AMD one was, in fact, king of the hill. That's a big plus for me for sure. The AMD ones also tend to be very competitive in scientific type software, another big plus.
The new APU should be a game changer. GPU like performance without the wretched CPU-GPU latency that kills GPUs for most applications because GPUs suck at many things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The CPU prices were higher because it was more expensive to make CPUs back then. With the past technology you couldn't put as many dies on the wafer.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Why not then use PC-BSD? The latest in 9.2 is that they're adding support for pkgng in addition to PBI, which makes installation of new software even easier. And for those who must have particular Linux apps not supported under the BSDs, there are Linux jails - both Debian & Gentoo - that can be used if one wishes to support it.
And as somebody who builds and uses AMD exclusively while I'd like to see some new chips come out I have to say....it makes perfect sense. Their production is being taken up by the console Jaguar chips (based on Bobcat, i don't know WTF the console manufacturers were thinking but its good for AMD regardless) and coming out with a new chip would take resources away from that. Also there will of course be mainstream boards based on jaguar once the orders for the console chips are filled and I'm sure they are hoard a big pile of X6 and X4 jags that had one or two modules not pass muster so there is designing chipsets for those and of course their GPU line so their plate is rather full ATM.
I also really can't blame them in this matter as I have been saying for years and time and time again I've seen with my own two eyes that CPUs passed "good enough" several releases ago and even the Phenom II based chips and first gen Bulldozers really are overkill for all but a handful of users. Take myself as an example since I do a LOT of multitasking and therefor use more CPU than most. I transcode videos, edit multitrack audio recordings and I just loooove my shooters. Now throughout the 90s and a good chunk of the 00s I HAD to replace my PC every 2 years with major upgrades such as CPU and RAM added on the "off" years because I really had no choice, the software coming out at the time would just overwhelm a 2 year old PC, and now? I'm typing this on a 2009 Phenom II X6 with 8GB of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, why would I buy a new PC? Frankly the only upgrade I need is to swap out the aging HD4850 for an HD7770 and that will be less than $100 come the holidays so even with me multitasking like mad even this 4 year old chip runs everything I want to run and runs it well.
So there really isn't a point in them coming out with new CPUs or APUs at the moment as the ones that they are selling now are extreme overkill. I'm sure a few will chime in with "But but but...i7!" but ya know what? Know how many people actually give a rat's ass about which corp has the biggest e-Peen? From what I've seen selling to folks from all walks of life, from the gamers to the grandmas i'd say that number is less than 5%, maybe even as low as 3%. Everybody else just wants a snappy powerful system at a good price that won't sit there bogged down and the current AMD chips deliver that in spades. I've had not a bit of trouble moving desktops based on Phenom II X3 and X4, even the Athlon X3 and X4 moves pretty briskly and of course those 6 and 8 cores are easy sells to the heavy multitaskers and everybody likes those new $400 quad APU laptops as those babies have plenty of cycles to spare. Showing off how you can just plug them into any TV and get a full 1080P media center when you are done roaming for the day just seals the deal, no problem.
Personally if I were in the big chair I'd probably be doing the same thing, wait until the next gen consoles are out, get the Jaguar ULV APU boards and laptops out (probably along with a "the same tech that powers the PS4 and Xbox N!" advertising campaign) and then and ONLY then would I start really concentrating on getting those next chips out. Also remember that they hired back the chip designer that made the original Athlon64 along with the A6 for Apple so I'm sure he is cooking up something as well so it might be smart to wait and see if his new chip will be worth dropping the BD arch for. All in all I'd say AMD is in a good position right now, all three major consoles are using chips made by them (one GPU and two APUs) and while their current chips might not win a dick measuring contest with Intel frankly they are extreme overkill for the majority of mainstream customers whom I can tell you are quite happy to have that bang for the buck. It also helps that Intel has been stupidly greedy as of late, with the bottom of the barrel Pentium Dual Core being the chip they have matched price wise with the new X6s and frankly they don't have anything priced in the realm of the X3s and X4s, makes it that much easier for guys like me to make a sale, go AMD!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The boxed processor I bought (FX4300, quad @ 3.8ghz OC'd to 4.1ghz) is using the stock AMD HSF that it came with. It usually runs around 42C and gets up to maybe 53-54C under a load that pegs all 4 cores (movie encoding, which I often do).
At no point is the CPU fan ever even audible. The only thing I can hear other than some HDD whine is the PSU fan on my Antec Neo Eco 520.
And how are you getting that the AMD processor uses 220w more than the Intel? The Bulldozer TDP is 125w (AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz). The i7 3770K is 77W. And AMD rates at peak while Intel rates at average.
Even with the beast of an nVidia card I have in there the 520w PSU is more than enough. Sounds like you just want there to be price parity for some reason. AMD is cheap, they do it well, it's their niche.