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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."
...how much faster does it mine Bitcoins?
I need to mine some so I can put them in a totally safe online wallet.
Yes, if you spend more money you can get more performance. The whole point of the APU is that you can spend less on a single piece of silicon than you would for "a better CPU and a decent graphics card."
Yes. One part with a middle of the road CPU and a middle of the road GPU.
The one advantage I see technically to this approach is you can get data from the CPU to the GPU without having to touch a trace on the motherboard. The over all complexity of the system goes down and the CPU to GPU performance goes up.
The disadvantages are many. More heat/power dissipation on the one part means it will run hotter (not that AMD doesn't do that anyway). Makes you pay for the GPU, even if you don't use/want it. Higher latency between the memory and the GPU which is KEY to a GPU performance. I'm sure there's more..
All this aside. Bully for AMD. These are great devices for low cost systems with reasonable performance.
Full Disclosure: I have a current low end AMD/GPU based system that I really like. It was CHEAP, and performs well enough for what I do.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Yes, but could you do that in a compact HTPC cabinet (breadbox sized or smaller) and have your total system draw less than 100W or so?
I'm really excited by this news - because it allows traditional desktops to reinvent themselves.
Think Steam Machines, think HTPC that lets you do full HD and 4k in the future, think HTPC that also lets you do light-weight or mid-level gaming.
Think of a replacement to consoles - a computing device that gives you 90% of the convenience of a dedicated console, but gives you full freedom to download and play from the app store of your choice (Steam or anything else), gives you better control of your hardware, and lets you mix and match controllers (Steam Controller, keyboard and mouse, or something else that someone invents a year down the line).
I'm long on AMD for this reason. Maybe I'm a sucker. But there is a chance that desktops can find a place in your living room instead of your basement. And I'm quite excited about that.
You can call the advantage "complexity", but in practice that really means price, heat, and size, all of which are critical to laptops. Additionally, putting them on the same die makes it easier to have unified memory, which can further simplify things (and be as fast or faster in some applications for the less money if designed correctly - for example, compute tasks that touch a lot of the same data on the CPU and GPU like video encoding, etc).
And it most definitely does not have to "run hotter" than *two* discrete parts (and is certainly easier to cool, anyway). Computers are *always* using a GPU these days, modern OSes do all sorts of 3D effects (even some mobile ones). If the GPU (and software/driver) is designed well, it would be a lot simpler, cheaper, and possibly even more power efficient than the dual-graphics design of Macbook Pros and some Wintel laptops...
For a desktop, this isn't anything all that exciting (except for those who want cheap PCs with reasonable performance). For a laptop/embedded system, it's a really interesting chip, even if it's not the cheapest.
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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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.
The 4770K has an Intel HD 4600, not an Iris Pro 5200. The nVidia GPU is faster than the 4600 in the CPU tested.
The only 4770 series chip to feature Iris Pro is the 4770R.
Reference: http://ark.intel.com/products/family/75023
It also probably costs as much for the CPU and GPU as it would for the entire AMD-based system.
The highest end AMD APU you can currently build includes an A10-6800K, which is a whopping $140 for the CPU+GPU. Include the cost of RAM for the GPU so that it can be comparable with a discrete GPU setup...$22 to compensate for dedicating 2GB of DDR3 1866 to the GPU...
$140 + $22 = $166.
His GTX 660 is $190. His i7 is no less than $290 based on todays newegg prices.
$190 + $290 = $480
So he is $314 in the hole. Clearly he doesnt want to talk about semantics such as cost.
"His name was James Damore."
Actually this is a bigger deal than you think. I remember when you had to pay extra to get a floating point processor. Most software worked really hard to use integers when ever they could since they could not depend on an FPU being in most systems.
By having a GPU as part of the CPU more software will start to use GPU computing to speed up things like transcoding and even spreadsheets http://slashdot.org/story/13/07/03/165252/libreoffice-calc-set-to-get-gpu-powered-boost-from-amd.
We all know that GPUs can speed up a lot of operations but developers don't want to put in the work because not everyone has them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, I'm saying that the assertion that they doctored the test by using a GT 630 because it is slower than the iGPU in the 4770k is false. The post making this assertion bases it on the assumption that the iGPU that they disabled was the Iris Pro 5200 (which is faster than a 630) when in fact the reverse is true, the iGPU being disabled was the Intel HD 4600, which is slower than a 630.
I'm making no value judgements of AMD's APU whatsoever. Merely correcting a falsehood.