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AMD Confirms Kaveri APU Is a 512-GPU Core Integrated Processor
MojoKid writes "At APU13 today, AMD announced a full suite of new products and development tools as part of its push to improve HSA development. One of the most significant announcements to come out the sessions today-- albeit in a tacit, indirect fashion, is that Kaveri is going to pack a full 512 GPU cores. There's not much new to see on the CPU side of things — like Richland/Trinity, Steamroller is a pair of CPU modules with two cores per module. AMD also isn't talking about clock speeds yet, but the estimated 862 GFLOPS that the company is claiming for Kaveri points to GPU clock speeds between 700 — 800MHz. With 512 cores, Kaveri picks up a 33% boost over its predecessors, but memory bandwidth will be essential for the GPU to reach peak performance. For performance, AMD showed Kaveri up against the Intel 4770K running a low-end GeForce GT 630. In the intro scene to BF4's single-player campaign (1920x1080, Medium Details), the AMD Kaveri system (with no discrete GPU) consistently pushed frame rates in the 28-40 FPS range. The Intel system, in contrast, couldn't manage 15 FPS. Performance on that system was solidly in the 12-14 FPS range — meaning AMD is pulling 2x the frame rate, if not more."
nVidia has at least three versions of the GT630, each fairly different from one another. None of these would be an amazing accomplishment to beat, although they are more powerful than Intel's normal integrated offerings.
I read the internet for the articles.
Not paid any attention for 5+ years. So this is what, a GPU on a CPU that can play games?
So if I buy an AMD CPU, I can play games with low frame-rates at low detail settings (yeah, I know it says 'medium', but when almost all games now go at least up to 'ultra', 'medium' is the new 'low').
Or I could just buy a better CPU and a decent graphics card and play them properly.
...how much faster does it mine Bitcoins?
I need to mine some so I can put them in a totally safe online wallet.
What market is amd shooting for?
Haswell with iris pro will probably beat out amd for integrated graphics performance and will have better battery life.
On the top end, desktop users will always go for a dedicated graphics card.
On the mobile end, these things will eat up battery and have no reason to be on a tablet.
All that's left is the cheap oem side of things. Haswell is still fairly expensive on the low end. If intel can bring down the price a bit and make it competitive they will beat out amd in every category.
We need a CPU/GPU SoC based on the tech that's going in to the xbone and ps4. They both have multicore procs with a built in GPU that's capable of pushing next gen games at HD resolution.
We need that. A cheap PC built on a powerful single-chip solution. Not this wimpy shit.
Personally, I'd go for the the PS4 solution. 8 gigs of high speed GDDR5 that's both the main memory and graphics memory? Fuck yes. Give me that. I'd forgo the ability to expand memory if I could have GDDR5 as main memory. (The DDR3+128meg edram solution in the xbone is cheaper and clearly inferior)
They both have multicore procs with a built in GPU that's capable of pushing next gen games at HD resolution.
Not the Xbox One, it will render 720p and 900p and upscale it to 1080p. PS4 can render 1080p without upscaling.
The PS4 doesn't maintain constant 60 FPS though. It dips here and there :)
AMD should at least try using Intel Iris Pro which is their highest end GPU. The 630 GT is a ok low end GPU depending on which version they use.
GDDR5 doesn't perform well under loads the CPU throws at it. GDDR in general does really well for sequential things like scanning screens, reading textures, antialiasing. Peak bandwidth is a pretty terrible measure of memory performance... it makes big numbers look better though, which is why marketing departments like it.
Actually the clock speed for the 862GFLOPS figure is in the footnotes, see here: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7507/amd_kaveri_specs-100068009-orig.png
So, even unintentionally, they are talking about clock speeds...
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Not the Xbox One, it will render 720p and 900p and upscale it to 1080p. PS4 can render 1080p without upscaling.
Both can render 1080p. In practice, neither does everything in 1080p (although PS4 seems to have more titles with in actual HD).
They both can render 1080p games at 60 fps. Developers on consoles make the choices on performance for games. With a console, you hope that the developer has chosen the best balance of performance and graphical fidelity since you don't get to choose or play around with it like you can on the pc. You'll see better performance from these machines as the engines become more mature and the developers more experienced with the platforms.
Err, 5Gb/s GDDR5 has about the same absolute latencies as DDR3-2133...
These machines share the memory between CPUs and GPUs, and that's the advantage:
You can use the GPU cores to do otherwise forbiddingly expensive operations (such as detailed
physics, particle simulations, etc) very easily. Traditional systems need to copy data between vram and main memory over the bus system bus, which takes time.
Programming languages are already starting to support mixed CPU/GPU programming with through new language constructs. At the moment, mainly rendering and physics is done on the GPU, soon it will be easy to do anything that can be efficiently parallelized.
Brand new AMD APU with 512 GPU cores beats Discrete NVidia card with 128 cores that's more than a year old now.
Hang on, was this supposed to be impressive?
People were hoping that the Kaveri would allow a PC build to rival the Xbox One in integrated graphics game power. Not exactly a high target, considering how truly awful the Xbox One is proving to be judging by the low performance of its key release games. The Kaveri is, after all, more than a year late, and entering the market at a time when the traditional Wintel PCs are in a significant sales decline.
It now seems that Kaveri won't even have the 256-bit memory bus everyone was hoping for. A 128-bit bus of DDR3 memory with a 512-core GCN part is a VERY bad joke going into 2014. Sure, it whips Intel's best offering (and Intel's best offering in 2015), but that's like boasting you can run faster than a dog with only one leg.
The main problem with Kaveri is one of cost. If the CPU cluster (4 cores) is finally within Intel's CPU performance territory, AMD will want to price this part well over 200 dollars for the desktop part. At that price, it is too expensive by a factor of TWO to make any sense. ARM has changed the price of computing forever. People will pay for a first-class AAA gaming PC, but Kaveri is fit only for a mediocre casual gaming system.
Why isn't AMD providing parts anywhere near the SINGLE chip used in the PS4. Sony deserves the cream, while PC owners are worth s**t to AMD, we have to assume. AMD could have sold complete motherboard solutions for PC systems, with the APU and GDDR5 soldered onto the motherboard. Sadly, the dim-bulbs at AMD will NOT innovate in the PC space- they can only copy the manufacturing and system designs of Intel.
Kaveri is not just vastly slower than the PS4 (and Xbox One chip), it is using technology one generation behind the PS4 (although it is one generation ahead of the part in the Xbone). Only with the kaveri II, at the end of 2014 at the earliest, will AMD give PC users the same level of HSA and hUMA functionality found in the PS4 part.
AMD has an amazing technology advantage over its competition, but fails to provide this technology in the parts that make sense to customers. When it finally arrives, all too often it is too little too late. See the fiasco of AMD's new 290 GPU cards, with the world's cheapest and nastiest cooling solutions ruining their reputation. See the fiasco of AMD's amazing 'trueaudio technology' available in only those GPU products no sane person would buy (290 = too noisy, hot, expensive and power hungry AND 7790/260 = way too poor graphics performance). AMD failed to replace the vastly more desirable boards (the 7870/270 and the 7970/280) with products using respun chips having trueaudio added- this despite the fact that the 28nm manufacturing process has lasted forever, giving AMD plenty of time to make minor modifications to its existing chips.
AMD's motto is "give our paying customers as little as we can, as infrequently as possible". Where's the 280X with trueaudio AMD? Where's the Kaveri with 768+ shaders and a quad channel memory bus using GDDR5 (like the PS4) AMD? Why do you sell 2 core versions of your Richland APU, where the individual cores are CRIPPLED to have a far lower per-core performance than your 4 core Richland parts AMD? Why do you sell 4-core versions of your piledriver CPU chips, where the per-core performance is crippled to be far lower than the per-core performance of your 6-core and 8-core piledriver chips AMD?
On the CPU side, AMD is a very very distant second to Intel, and yet does everything it can to make the vast majority of its CPU parts as undesirable as possible, using artificial crippling of internal cache speeds on cheaper parts. Two AMD chips can have the SAME clock speed, and the SAME architecture, and yet the cheaper part will frequently perform HALF as quickly on a single-threaded task. This is ruinous to AMD's reputation, and yet AMD acts as if IT has the market leading position, not Intel.
Now to see if AMD totally screws up the launch of Mantle this Wednesday, like they screwed up the launch of Kaveri (comparing Kaveri to an i7 partnered with the worst discrete GPU imaginable- WTF).
As SOC become more capable, less need for dedicated GPU. Lower cost and smaller devices will drive this. If Kaveri plays BF4, it could take a big chunk of video card sales. AMD is going to catch up with Intel offloading parallel work to the GPU. Nvidia GPU will die out since they do not have a CPU to pair with it. Would have been good for Intel to by Nvidia. I don't think Intel will now that Nvidia is making Tegra ARM chips. Tegra is uphill battle against qualcomm and dozen other ARM companies.
Some of them have caught on to that saying, and now hold their breath while writing.