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."

Comments

Cool

[0123456]

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.

Re:Cool

[Rockoon]

Nothing.

This is whats going on here. User 0123456 purchased or built an i7 system and a 660 GT which surely cost somewhere between $600 and $1200, He is now trying to justify this expense to himself by arguing with others. If he really felt that he made a good decision, he wouldn't feel the need to throw out opinions ("because if you care about games, ...") as if it trumps the numbers.

Some people literally spend thousands on their gaming rigs, so why it is that he is so self-conscious about what he spent can only be speculated about.

Re:Yeah i don't get it

[jkflying]

Small form factor business PCs,

Don't need 3D performance. Don't need GPGPU performance in 99% of cases.

Doesn't matter, because it's cheap. Also, CAD and Photoshop *do* use GPGPU these days.

Media center PCs

Plenty fast enough already to play video at 1920x1080.

This should handle 4k video decoding.

low-end Steambox

If you want your games to look like crap.

I think you missed the "low end" part of that quote. Also, it will be really, really cheap compared to something with an additional dGPU. You don't even need PCIe on the motherboard. Not everybody can afford to game at 3x 1080p on high. These should handle 1080p on medium just fine.

Integrating the GPU into the CPU gets the BOM cost down and raises the minimum performance standard.

Because lots of people run 3D games on servers.

Certainly we do use GPUs for some floating-point intensive tasks on servers, but this is nowhere near fast enough to be useful.

These have HUMA. GPGPU-CPU interactions will be much faster than on any previous architecture because not only do they share memory space, they are also cache coherent at a hardware level. It suddenly makes having a whole bunch of FPUs on the graphics card useful for regular old FPU applications, because they can be accessed just as quickly as SSE/x87 FPUs. It makes OpenCL suddenly useful for very small kernels, instead of only being useful for massive data-processing chunks where the parallelisation had to be wide and simple enough to make up for memory copying overhead. TL;DR: I want this on my server, even if just for the stuff like generating graphics and accelerating database hashing. Never mind Folding@home and HPC kind of work.

Seriously, stop being such a downer.