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AMD A10 Kaveri APU Details Emerge, Combining Steamroller and Graphics Core Next
MojoKid writes "There's a great deal riding on the launch of AMD's next-generation Kaveri APU. The new chip will be the first processor from AMD to incorporate significant architectural changes to the Bulldozer core AMD launched two years ago and the first chip to use a graphics core derived from AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. A strong Kaveri launch could give AMD back some momentum in the enthusiast business. Details are emerging that point to a Kaveri APU that's coming in hot — possibly a little hotter than some of us anticipated. Kaveri's Steamroller CPU core separates some of the core functions that Bulldozer unified and should substantially improve the chip's front-end execution. Unlike Piledriver, which could only decode four instructions per module per cycle (and topped out at eight instructions for a quad-core APU), Steamroller can decode four instructions per core or 16 instructions per quad-core module. The A10-7850K will offer a 512-core GPU while the A10-7700K will be a 384-core part. Again, GPU clock speeds have come down, from 844MHz on the A10-6800K to 720MHz on the new A10-7850K but should be offset by the gains from moving to AMD's GCN architecture."
Laptops? While I'd love to see a nice, low cost CPU/GPU combo that can hang with my (rather meager) Athlon X2 6000+ and GT 240, I'm still running pretty low end gear. If this is targeted at enthusiasts they're just going to replace it with a card...
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If "Kaveri" is what you are referring to, it also happens to be the name of a river in South India.
I wish I had mod points.
Proud Phenom II user here. Awesome chip and I still use it on the gaming platform ... from 2010?!
I like the 6 core and only 10% slower than an icore 7! ... 1st generation icore 7 from 2010. :-(
IT is obsolete and I see no purpose to upgrade my system with it with another one. It is like making a multicore 486 at 3ghz. It would not hold a candle to anything made in the last 15 years.
AMD needs to do an Intel. Dump Netburst 2.0. Intel failed with the pentium IV but after 3 years the core2duo put them on the roadmap again. Intel kept trying to tweak and add instructions and overclo0ck the bloated Pentium IV until they gave up. AMD give up on steamroller ok? An integrated GPU was a nice idea that could have been the next 290X for a fraction of the cost, but like Itanium it never followed through. Make this a low end crap low power APU for tablets and a new architecture and another video card for everything else. No s hared FPUs either as that failed as well.
http://saveie6.com/
"Kaveri" in finnish means "pal" as in a friend.
Which is actually pretty fitting for the chip that has CPU and GPU on one die.
Dunno about you, but I ain't gonna be excited by AMD's offerings anymore, after what they dished to us on their Bulldozer roll out
For more than a year before Bulldozer came into being they told us that the Bulldozer gonna be revolutionary - they hyped the Bulldozer so much that many forums were filled with people just couldn't wait to get their hands on it
Did you think the same thing about Intel after the Pentium4 too?
So did you stop believing in Intel after their bugged Pentiums rolled off the line? ARM only from now on, until they screw something up?
Just because a company has a product that flopped doesn't mean they won't ever produce anything good again. While it's fine to not be excited until it's actually hit shelves, writing them off for the end of time seems a bit premature.
AC wrote : They love to gag on Polish sausages.
You wrote : Dunno about you, but I ain't gonna be excited by AMD's offerings anymore, and some other bumpf.
How exactly were you replying to the AC?
I know policy is to stick your comment as high as possible, if possible..... but you replied to someone who said "They love to gag on Polish sausages". You must have know that you weren't actually replying to them.
Kaveri should be properly compared to the chips in the PS4 and Xbone. As such, it can be said that Kaveri is significantly poorer than either.
-Kaveri is shader (graphics) weak compared to the Xbone, which itself is VERY weak compared to the PS4.
-Kaveri should be roughly CPU equivalent (multi-threaded) to the CPU power of eother console
-Kaveri is memory bandwidth weak compared to the Xbone, which itself is VERY bandwidth weak compared to the PS4
-Kaveri is a generation ahead of the Xbone in HSA/hUMA concepts, but the PS4 is a generation ahead of the Kaveri
There was ZERO reason for AMD to release a new APU that was significantly weaker than even the solution in the Xbox One, but sadly this is what the idiots at AMD are doing. The Kaveri integrated graphics are far to poor for anyone who really cares about PC gaming, reducing the worth of Kaveri to a power hungry, fairly decent 4-core CPU. The REAL Kaveri II (not the Kaveri which is coming around Xmas 2013 under the confusing name of Kaveri II) will be released around Xmas 2014 or later, and should be somewhat more powerful than the Xbox One. Kaveri II will also share the same sophisticated HSA/hUMA that is currently only found in the PS4.
And maybe by some miracle, AMD will grow a brain, and give Kaveri II a 256-bit memory bus to GDDR5 memory, not the stinking 128-bit bus to DD3 that Kaveri has.
At least Kaveri has True Audio (like the PS4 and 260/290 GPUs), and hopefully AMD's Mantle will enable PC systems using Kaveri with discrete graphics cards to still benefit from doing some work on the integrated GPU cores as well.
This is the chip that unites the CPU and GPU into one programing model with unified memory addressing. Heterogeneous System Architecture(HSA) and Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access(HUMA) are the nice buzzword acronyms that AMD came up with but it basically removes the latency from accessing GPU resources and makes memory sharing between the CPU cores and GPU cores copy free. You can now dispatch instructions to the GPU cores almost as easily and as quickly as you do to the basic ALU/FPU/SSE units of the CPU.
Will software be written to take advantage of this though?
Will Intel eventually support it on their stuff?
Ars article on the new architecture.
Anandtech article on the Kaveri release.
Maybe, but Kaveri APU translates as "friend help" in Finnish...
- Single-thread performance matters much more than multi-thread performance, and Kaveri has almost twice the single-thread performance of the Xbone and PS4 chips.
- Memory bandwidth is expensive. You either need wide and expensive bus, or expensive low-capasity graphics DRAM which need soldering, and means you are limited to 4 GiB of memory(with the highest capasity GDDR chips out there), with zero possibility of late upgrading it, or both(and MAYBE get 8 giB of soldered memory). Though there has been rumours that Kaveri might support GDDR5, for configurations with only 4 GiB of soldered memory.
- And when you have that limited memory bandwidth, it does not make sense to waste die space on creating monster GPU which is starved by the lack of bandwidth.
- ALL the mentioned chips are of same generation. All support cache-coherent unified memory.
As PC chip, Kaveri makes much more sense:
- Software that matters on PC cannot use 8 threads. Kaveri is much faster at most software
- Weaker GPU side, ability to use cheap DDR3, and narrower memory bus makes Kaveri chip and kaveri-bases systems cheaper to manufacture
- The CPU can be socket, need to to be soldered, and the memory chips can use DIMMs instead of soldering to motherboard. Ability to upgrade something and system manufacturers to easily create different configurations.
It depends if the chip is running in a mac or a PC ;-D
Tomorrow is another day...
I run a core 2 duo on a motherboard 8 years old, with a gtx460 (it was originally with an 8800GT, which I pensioned off) and I will guarantee you my PC outperforms most PCs sold today, gaming-wise.
The Core2Duo was a good chip for its time, but current Intels outperform it by a wide margin. I'm pretty sure that even current AMDs beat it, despite their Bulldozer mis-design. Likewise, the GTX460 will be beaten by modern cards.
If you are talking about Intel PCs that use only integrated graphics, your claim might be true. But gamers usually understand that they need a discrete GPU ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
For several years now, AMD is using islands names for the internal GPU names (being the type/location of island used to group families) and river names for the CPUs/APUs. Kaveri is a river in India... that just by luck is also a word in Polish and Scandinavia.
Higuita