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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.
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.
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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.
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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!
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?
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.
See: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaveri
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