Yeah, I know FM2+ is suppose to be 95w. I also know that most power consumption tests put Trinity & Richland up closer to 135+w under Prime95+Furmark loads. That's a lot of heat to push out of a 1-2L box.
If your gonna use it as an HTPC prime+furmark is i would think a pointless benchmark for thermals as you'll never stress it enough to come close to that worse case scenario
" I also know that most power consumption tests put Trinity & Richland up closer to 135+w under Prime95+Furmark loads."
No, they don't. You forget that TDP is related to the CPU itself. It's not related to the whole system or the efficiency of power supplies or voltage converters.
No, the TDP includes integrated graphics. It is the TDP of the entire processor - GPU and CPU - not just one part of it. I can't corroborate the 135W number, but 95W is indeed the rating for the APU as a whole.
I don't think too many people would consider a stock 3.7GHz APU conservatively clocked... particularly on a 95W platform... that is astounding, in fact, considering where AMD has been and the 8 GCN compute cores taking part of that 95W TDP.
Though, I would not be surprised if there was some dynamic throttling to stay below the TDP - AMD's "Power Play" extended to also include the CPU modules in its algorithms.
No need for the top model to skimp on power consumption - if people want it. There should be a 65 W version with all funtional units enabled, though, for everyone else. So far these models have been available and occupied quite a sweet spot.
only up to 720p is this true, thereafter it won't have enough bandwidth to keep up. DDR4 will be a big deal especially for AMD. In a way, I find waiting for DDR4 version to be the superior route as its nearly twice as fast.
Has anyone actually confirmed whether Kaveri will have a DDR4 memory controller? I very much doubt it, and if it doesn't have one at launch, it'll be another generation until AMD gets its stuff together. By then, a typical SFF/low-power PC will have been replaced by consoles... :(
You cannot compare the 512 SP to your 5770 at all. The 5770 uses an older architecture, it's like comparing Core 2 with a Pentium 4. The article already said that the graphics processor in Kaveri is roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7750 which is an amazing feat for an integrated graphics to be rather high up in the binning. Intel doesn't even have anything remotely close to that type of graphics horsepower.
Here's to hoping that they might release an enthusiast oriented chip, like they did initially with the FX 9370/9590. Would like to see the possibilities of building a budget-ish PC with a strong integrated GPU.
Me too. Building an entry level gaming and allround rig for my kid. An APU that can handle BF4 1080P at 24-30 fps is perfect. Of course it's dependent on pricing as well.
Wow, spend an extra $100 bucks and get him something that can run faster than 30fps. 30 fps sucks for gaming. It's playable but that's it. Make your kid earn some money around the house doing chores or whatever, but don't consign him to 30 fps hell!
A constant 30fps isn't bad. I'm interested in how Mantle affects this once it's available, however in general you'll be dropping settings down a bit to ensure a decent framerate floor. Having said that, in the past there's never really been any question about running games in medium quality in 1080p as it's been an exercise in pointlessness, so we're getting closer to having integrated graphics that can truly take over from all but the mid-high and higher range cards.
That Ain't the point dummy! The point is bing able to build a rif with a siple 150$ APU and below 99$ MB and bé able to plat gammes. Sure you're gonna have better GPS with a GTX 780 Ti.
You would have to spend far more than another $100 to get better performance using discrete solutions. You still need a decent CPU, so you are looking at $85 on the lowest side there, then you need a video card able to push significantly more than the APU. You're looking at $100 just for performance parity, $135 gets you the R7 260X, which is really the cheapest feature-parity performance-superior product available.
Then you need a better power supply as well... you can't buy one of the cheap $35/$45 quality 300W power supplies... you'll need a decent 450-500W power supply for any half-decent discrete solution.
You can do all that, or you can just buy the top-end $130 or so APU and a good aftermarket cooler on a half-decent motherboard with some good RAM and a cheap HDD...
Graphics is essentially where I thought, they still cheap a bit and is essentially at Intel levels in terms of GFLOPS (my guess would have been 700-800 GFLOPS, and yes 512 SP with HSA-features). They have to be careful with notebook parts, they cannot keep cutting back there. On the notebook side it has to compete against Broadwell and new Haswell skus after all. Seems to be just a few weeks short of a 2013 launch and manufacturing seems to be on track, to bad they didn't push for limited availability for 2013. Gives them a lot of bad PR.
Nice to see some more details coming out. Mantle is a bit overplayed though, and more details won't come out till 13 th nov so I don't get why a lot people rage about it. It's low level, access into the inner workings of the drivers basically but it isn't a replacement for the higher more abstracted api's, it's not writing gpu microcode either and if you wanted to keep up with features without running the latest Windows version then there was always OpenGL and still is, features like Partially Resident Textures was developed and was available on OGL for years before it became part of DX. It's great if it is a complement you can use together with OGL or D3D, but that is not what people expect here really. Plus OpenCL is the main compute API here any way. C++ targeting HSAIL won't sideline it the models is good for different tasks.
The problem is that they usually cut stream processors and clock speed on the mobile chips. A GT3-chip at 28W is still 700 GFLOPS. 8650G is 400 GFLOPS and HD4400 is roughly 350 GFLOPS. Drivers don't make up for it on that scale. Plus the 5757M isn't really 35W. Plus basically get half the battery life of a comparable Haswell machine.
Oh I wasn't really thinking about that they included the CPU in the GFLOPS. That makes A10-6800k 779 GFLOPS or the 8670D 648 GFLOPS and this new GPU just 737 GFLOPS. Though it's probably not the highest SKU, and the 3.7GHz is not the turbo freq.
The worry appears to be that even at 856 GFLOPS, Kaveri is about 20% less powerful than previously touted. This article (with slides from AMD) shows Kaveri was originally meant to be at 1,050 GFLOPS, meaning a CPU clock speed reduction of 8%, but a dramatic GPU clock speed reduction of 25%. The assumption is based on the fact that the A10-7850K is the top Kaveri part, but that's a sound assumption.
If this is true, it will barely outperform Trinity/Richland in synthetics, but we know those don't always matter. The real question now is - why is Kaveri less powerful than originally stated?
I think engineers over-estimated the performance increase with GCN 1.1 revisions or had to exclude an anticipated improvement to make their target dates... or power draw was more than expected...
That could also explain why AMD was so unprepared with an updated cooler for the Hawaii GPUs...
GCN 1.1 aka HD7790 has been out for a while and was retail before any pre-production ready engineerings samples of Kaveri.
I think it's simply a matter of power and not the top sku possible. But that is symptomatic of AMD as that always happens way worse for the mainstream notebook chips. They cannot really keep doing that.
If you look at that AMD slide, Trinity is essentially where Richland ended up. So it's not GCN (1.1) specific really. A10-5800K was 736 GFLOPS. They said it would be 819 for the 2013 ed (Richland).
Wonder about the naming though, what comes after A10-7850K? XX90K?
Mantle is kind of a big deal if only because it gets rid of the need for DirectX. Yes OGL has been there for years but clearly not many companies like it or at least don't want to use it for some reason. If this can catch on and AMD starts actually paying attention to their Linux drivers, They could become the goto company for Steam OS and gamers who don't like Windows in general.
Mantle is nothing at all like Direct X and could not possibly replace it as it doesn't have almost any features. Do you even understand what direct X is.
The most important thing for me is, is this new APU less of a bottleneck for FPS in games; does it compete with Intel; because Intel irrefutably leads at the moment. If it does, then it's a sensible purchase. Otherwise, it's a deal breaker. I'm much more excited about Nvidia's Kepler or whatever they are release in May, and why would I choose an AMD cpu if even its new its already lagging, having difficulty with CPU bound games.
can you not read? this is an apu, not a cpu this is where AMD leads. Worry about cpu perf when discrete cpus[if they are still a thing] launch and stop being silly.
It's still a valid question, especially considering the touted improvements over the Piledriver architecture.
AMD shouldn't really compare IGP coverage areas with Intel's chips. For one, AMD's cores are smaller, and despite the 2MB L2 per module, there's no L3 to factor into the equation. The i7, as an example, should have far more transistors devoted to its CPU portion than the 2M/4T Steamroller would.
Its only 300 because Intel can sell it for 300. The only difference between a $150 i5 and a i7 is all artificial (hyperthreading and depending on the skus, unlicked multiplier). The problem is that Intel's graphics are more efficient and have far less die space dedicated to them and their CPUs blow AMDs out the water.
Assuming that PCWorld is correct, the clock speed regression is worrying: going back from 4.1 GHz to 3.7 GHz could wipe out a sizable portion of the IPC gains in lightly-threaded workloads. At least these APUs should perform more like a true quad-core chip due to the reduction of the CMT penalty.
The server market is going to want a CPU-only product with more cores, at least six or eight. So are enthusiasts. Kaveri is a good mainstream product, but if AMD wants to get back high-margin business, it won't be enough on its own. It would make sense to unify both servers and high-end desktops on a single socket, like Intel did with LGA 2011; the existing AM3+ platform is getting a bit long in the tooth.
Efficiency vs Brute Force. Intel scaled back from 3.4-ish ghz on the P4 to a mere 2.66 ghz on the Core 2 and they still won a huge performance increase, in a time where all loads were lightly threaded.
Also agree with the AM3+ sentiment, they will definitely need at least a new chipset to get PCIe 3.0 support since their new GPUs in crossfire are now directly taxing the bus bandwidth.
That is totally not a valid comparison. Yes, intel went to lower clock speed in the Core 2 vs the P4, but that is also talking about two totally different architectures, two totally different products. Here they are just talking about one product, one architecture, and a 3-400Mhz reduction in clock speed. Not even close to the same thing.
Eight K8-style cores will be fine if the workload is divvied out relatively well. Sony reckons the CPU is ten times faster than that of the PS3, but in the end, if so many tasks are being offloaded to dedicated sound and graphics hardware, I doubt it'll be a problem using those eight cores to balance out the remaining workload.
Note: Sony may have said the PS4 was ten times faster than the PS3, and not necessarily the CPU itself. There's varying articles out there on the subject that mention it in the headline yet back away in the actual article.
Oh, I'm not saying the PS4 itself is shitty, but each one of those cores has weak single thread performance even compared to Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture. Compared to common CPUs people have in their desktops, such as Ivy or Haswell, "Shitty" is fair to say for Jaguar in comparison.
It means that the code will have to be heavily threaded. The GPU in the PS4 is all you could hope for in a console at that price point, though.
Fucking silvermont atom which uses a 1/4 the power and a whole lot less doe space is equal in performance to jaguar AMD its cheaper. Its fair to say jaguar is quite bad. The cyclone in A7 is equivilant in performance as well and that is a phone core
AMD APU's are always great at graphics performance but it stands nowhere near the computing power of intel CPU's. Power consumption will also be big factor as intel move to 14 nm fabrication.
If tasks are being split between the CPU and GPU cores then I don't see why AMD cannot catch up in some areas. With a 512-SP GPU behind FP calculations, there's no reason as to why Kaveri can't significantly outmanoeuvre even an i7 in specific circumstances. In two months, we may find this out.
It would require more power, but to provide the sort of FP power that an i7 produces could be achieved by having a small portion of the GPU power gated for such a purpose. As such, you could probably reduce clock speeds for the Steamroller cores for gaming in order to drop power usage back down.
Mantle will enable developers to dispatch workloads in such a fashion, across multiple compute units. Even more so when HSA gains traction with anything non-games.
AMD was doing quite well in heavily multithreaded tasks though. (but not per watt) Also note that they've closed the gap with the recent generation.
With major consoles having 8 cores + most games being multi-plats, we will inevitably see AMD doing better CPU wise, as heavy multi-threading will become a norm.
Which is fine for most laptop users. The current A10 flagship gives performance in the neighborhood of the Intel i3, while the APU graphics performance is in the neighborhood of an entry to mid-level discrete chip. The real problem though is that there aren't many great laptops out there with AMD APUs. Most AMD portables are in the budget category with slower APUs and below-average build quality.
Kaveri will be replaced by a new socket and a Excavator-based CPU fairly soon around 14/15, depending on market, if they are serious my guess is we see Server first. No need for a shrink 12 months after they start to ship wafers to AMD in Malaysia. 20 nm TSMC gpu's should come with GCN2 or whatever displaces GCN 1.1 and SI/VI. That's sometimes next year.
Of course they are, they also moved to bulk this time for the AMD designs. Kaveri samples was from Dresden, but later on they can be fabbed in New York or Singapore too. They have many other customers, and I'm pretty sure they did do work on 28nm FD-SOI together with ST. They also work on 14 nm at the moment. They use the same tools and processes as other Common Platform partners, so it will be there at about the same time as on Samsung and IBM. They aren't a dinosaur and plenty of the mobile companies use them, and will use them.
150$ APU 89$ board 8GB 2133 RAM @ 65$ 2TB HD @99$ BD drive @65$ =XBone-like power for 470$, choose your case +psu +OS at your liking. (if you're upgrading you already have those) Or this makes a NICE steambox. It's getting there. Next gen APU + next node, we'll be talkin.
2 CPU cores in the biggest version, or 4 cores if you count those integer cores too... So this should be allmost as fast as AMD 4300, but with huge GPU part... Actually not bad at all for APU! So we have to wait for 14nm or something until we will see 4 Core CPU in AMD APU. By then this can be really interesting!
I don't think it'll give xb-one like gpu performance without the embedded dram. Personally I think they should added that, or added triple or quad channel ddr3.
That would probably give XB-One levels of performance, + mantle. Would be pretty cool for a cheap box.
I hope AMD starts paying attention to their Linux drivers, in which case this could be a very good platform for a Steam Machine.
If it is good, I might build a Kaveri-based Steam box next year, hopefully XBMC is up and running on SteamOS quickly, and if they can get the likes of Netflix to sign up as well, this would be my dream living room PC.
Not sure if it's AMD (it employs several developers), or just pure volounteer effort, or other organizations like RedHat, but open-source AMD drivers are getting seriously good. They lag behind by a couple of OpenGL versions and it takes several releases until latest GPU is supported, but Open Source Radeon drivers are probably best open source drivers out there except for Intel.
Because this one APU that has been revealed runs at lower frequency (on GPU side) than initially planned. This doesn't mean that the top model will be limited to only 720 MHz (after all discrete desktop GCN models with identical/comparable unit count are closer to 900-1000 MHz with very reasonable TDP).
Everybody keeps assuming that just because some article says this chip is top of the line Kaveri, this is actually the case. AMD came up with A8-3870 to follow up on 3850 in Llano generation and with faster ships in Trinity/Richland generation. It is reasonable to expect Kaveri chips that actually meet the 900 MHz projection which would put its GPU performance right at the 1000+ GFlops mark.
Not really. Those new versions were just slight tweaks woth binning and clock speed bumps. AMD simply could not put it to 750+ MHz without the thing reaching insane TDP.
That is absolutely not true. I know many people who would buy a Kaveri over an Intel with discrete GPU. Not to bash Intel as I have all the respect in the world for them and their technologies, however, I definitely give about 10x more credit to AMD, because they are less than a 10th the size of Intel, their entire annual profits are less than Intel's R&D budget alone, and yet they are still able to come up with new, innovative products that are competitive with Intel, and which Intel is forced to copy as they are such great ideas. AMD came up with 64bit cpus first, multi-cores cpus first, APU's first, and now HSA as well as the first truly capable 3D directional audio technology, which they are including in Kaveri! People dont seem to realize that Kaveri isn't just a CPU, it's so much more and all on one chip. The result of which is that you can create an entire gaming PC for such a little amount of money. Not everyone has the cash to dish out for a 4770k, GTX Titan, and multi-hundred dollar sound card. Kaveri offers a nice quad core CPU (keep in mind that 3.7GHz is only what they are offering right out the gate. It is the early, rushed to market model. You can surely expect them to offer higher clocked, better binned versions in the future. I easily see 4GHz+ Kaveri to follow), a GPU that is as good as a low end discrete GPU, which is good enough to play just about everything, including the latest games (albeit at lower settings, but, possibly even at med+ settings if Mantle provides a decent enough boost in performance), and an awesome sound processor, all in one low cost part. With that, you can buy inexpensive and unobtrusive tiny form factor cases and build yourself a portable, respectable, little machine that will handle just about anything that most users will ask of it.
The new Steamroller cores catch AMD up to Sandy Bridge levels, which to me, is finally an acceptable level of performance and finally a truly competitive position as opposed to before, so kudos to them for finally getting there, even though it's very late.
In all honesty, I'm torn on what to use for my next build. I'm interested in a 4770K, an FX8350 (there is upside now that games are finally using the additional cores, are being written specifically with AMD 8-core hardware in mind since they own the gaming industry now, and because Mantle may increase the value of the hardware), and then Kaveri. If HSA takes off, Kaveri will truly be a kickass little piece of technology.
If AMD just made an 8-core Steamroller FX chip, there wouldnt even be any contemplation for me in terms of what to buy. I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but sad face, I must keep my fingers crossed for a future 8c Steamroller or Excavator CPU.
TL;DR - Kaveri is a lot more than it seems, especially for those on a budget, and there are power users, such as myself, who would indeed consider Kaveri over other options as it offers so much for so little, all with the potential to be amazing if HSA takes off. There's almost nothing bad about Kaveri for what it is. People should keep their minds a bit more open with regard to this little gem.
Also, the gpu should be more discreet-like in performance. If I read the article correctly the gpu and cpu can now share the same address space. Which will reduce the need for memory bandwith since the gpu doesn't have to access everything through the cpu. So this should be a quick gpu inside this chip.
The APU uses R7 graphics, so that might not work, but fingers crossed indeed. I just watched a video that shows the flagship kaveri run battlefield 4 1080 at minimum FPS of 28 (without mantle) on what looks like medium or medium low settings, but still looks great. Take your current A10-6800k, add 10FPS to the min FPS for a given game for Richland, 12 for trinity, and 15 FPS if you had the 256 SP APU and that's a good performance estimation of Kaveri; 15-20% improved single threaded performance, 128 more SPs, higher GPU clock, + still overclock-able albeit not as much, but you'll either be given the performance I state, or you'll be able to reach it.
now we are looking at apu's that might actually be usefull to casual gamers and power users alike, still not top end but we are almost at the end of the large form factor!
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takeship - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Crossing my fingers that their top SKUs will be sub-100w. Perfect for HTPC/SFF if so.axien86 - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
The light and sexy laptop they displayed shows AMD's Kaveri scales from embedded to mobile to desktop and to servers!With Mantle and Trueaudio support, everyone from Steam PCs to the whole array of laptop OEMs could make AMD's Kaveri the APU Comeback Kid.
ericore - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
lol, the FM2+ socket is for 95W TDP processors, why do you think they had to be conservative with the clock speeds; that doesn't look weird to you.takeship - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Yeah, I know FM2+ is suppose to be 95w. I also know that most power consumption tests put Trinity & Richland up closer to 135+w under Prime95+Furmark loads. That's a lot of heat to push out of a 1-2L box.SunLord - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
If your gonna use it as an HTPC prime+furmark is i would think a pointless benchmark for thermals as you'll never stress it enough to come close to that worse case scenariogruffi - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
" I also know that most power consumption tests put Trinity & Richland up closer to 135+w under Prime95+Furmark loads."No, they don't. You forget that TDP is related to the CPU itself. It's not related to the whole system or the efficiency of power supplies or voltage converters.
Minion4Hire - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
No, the TDP includes integrated graphics. It is the TDP of the entire processor - GPU and CPU - not just one part of it. I can't corroborate the 135W number, but 95W is indeed the rating for the APU as a whole.looncraz - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I don't think too many people would consider a stock 3.7GHz APU conservatively clocked... particularly on a 95W platform... that is astounding, in fact, considering where AMD has been and the 8 GCN compute cores taking part of that 95W TDP.Though, I would not be surprised if there was some dynamic throttling to stay below the TDP - AMD's "Power Play" extended to also include the CPU modules in its algorithms.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
No need for the top model to skimp on power consumption - if people want it. There should be a 65 W version with all funtional units enabled, though, for everyone else. So far these models have been available and occupied quite a sweet spot.DaTanMan - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Hot dayum. 512 SPs. That puts it roughly at the same performance as my 5770... Not bad at all for integrated graphics.ericore - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
only up to 720p is this true, thereafter it won't have enough bandwidth to keep up. DDR4 will be a big deal especially for AMD. In a way, I find waiting for DDR4 version to be the superior route as its nearly twice as fast.monstercameron - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
then again 1080p30 medium is achievable in BF4 so...LemmingOverlord - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
Has anyone actually confirmed whether Kaveri will have a DDR4 memory controller? I very much doubt it, and if it doesn't have one at launch, it'll be another generation until AMD gets its stuff together. By then, a typical SFF/low-power PC will have been replaced by consoles... :(deltatux - Sunday, November 24, 2013 - link
You cannot compare the 512 SP to your 5770 at all. The 5770 uses an older architecture, it's like comparing Core 2 with a Pentium 4. The article already said that the graphics processor in Kaveri is roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 7750 which is an amazing feat for an integrated graphics to be rather high up in the binning. Intel doesn't even have anything remotely close to that type of graphics horsepower.meacupla - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Is there any confirmation on 4K video playback?Ryan Smith - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Nothing was specifically mentioned. But it's the same decode block as found in the other GCN 1.1 GPUs.meacupla - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
I guess I'll have to wait for the review in January then :)bluemouse500 - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
4k playback works. I can't say how I know this thoughGX1XD1PD - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Here's to hoping that they might release an enthusiast oriented chip, like they did initially with the FX 9370/9590. Would like to see the possibilities of building a budget-ish PC with a strong integrated GPU.Gadgety - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Me too. Building an entry level gaming and allround rig for my kid. An APU that can handle BF4 1080P at 24-30 fps is perfect. Of course it's dependent on pricing as well.SunLord - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
You should be able to get 30+fps out of this in BF4 on the lowest gfx settings one would think.Nagorak - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Wow, spend an extra $100 bucks and get him something that can run faster than 30fps. 30 fps sucks for gaming. It's playable but that's it. Make your kid earn some money around the house doing chores or whatever, but don't consign him to 30 fps hell!silverblue - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
A constant 30fps isn't bad. I'm interested in how Mantle affects this once it's available, however in general you'll be dropping settings down a bit to ensure a decent framerate floor. Having said that, in the past there's never really been any question about running games in medium quality in 1080p as it's been an exercise in pointlessness, so we're getting closer to having integrated graphics that can truly take over from all but the mid-high and higher range cards.Da W - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
That Ain't the point dummy! The point is bing able to build a rif with a siple 150$ APU and below 99$ MB and bé able to plat gammes. Sure you're gonna have better GPS with a GTX 780 Ti.rituraj - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
There's a ghost sitting on your finger...looncraz - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
You would have to spend far more than another $100 to get better performance using discrete solutions. You still need a decent CPU, so you are looking at $85 on the lowest side there, then you need a video card able to push significantly more than the APU. You're looking at $100 just for performance parity, $135 gets you the R7 260X, which is really the cheapest feature-parity performance-superior product available.Then you need a better power supply as well... you can't buy one of the cheap $35/$45 quality 300W power supplies... you'll need a decent 450-500W power supply for any half-decent discrete solution.
You can do all that, or you can just buy the top-end $130 or so APU and a good aftermarket cooler on a half-decent motherboard with some good RAM and a cheap HDD...
Malih - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Looks like it's going to be in my next HTPC/Light gaming boxPenti - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Graphics is essentially where I thought, they still cheap a bit and is essentially at Intel levels in terms of GFLOPS (my guess would have been 700-800 GFLOPS, and yes 512 SP with HSA-features). They have to be careful with notebook parts, they cannot keep cutting back there. On the notebook side it has to compete against Broadwell and new Haswell skus after all. Seems to be just a few weeks short of a 2013 launch and manufacturing seems to be on track, to bad they didn't push for limited availability for 2013. Gives them a lot of bad PR.Nice to see some more details coming out. Mantle is a bit overplayed though, and more details won't come out till 13 th nov so I don't get why a lot people rage about it. It's low level, access into the inner workings of the drivers basically but it isn't a replacement for the higher more abstracted api's, it's not writing gpu microcode either and if you wanted to keep up with features without running the latest Windows version then there was always OpenGL and still is, features like Partially Resident Textures was developed and was available on OGL for years before it became part of DX. It's great if it is a complement you can use together with OGL or D3D, but that is not what people expect here really. Plus OpenCL is the main compute API here any way. C++ targeting HSAIL won't sideline it the models is good for different tasks.
meacupla - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
HD5x00 graphics equipped Haswell eats up more power. So much so, that AMD APUs don't look too bad on the mobile and ultra portable market.15W, i5-4300U, 2.9Ghz turbo, HD4400
28W, i5-4258U, 2.9Ghz turbo, HD5100 <-13W increase in TDP with improved graphics
25W, A10-5745M, 2.9Ghz turbo, HD8610G
35W, A10-5757M, 3.5Ghz turbo, HD8650G <- probably closer to the performance Haswell U offers.
Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
The problem is that they usually cut stream processors and clock speed on the mobile chips. A GT3-chip at 28W is still 700 GFLOPS. 8650G is 400 GFLOPS and HD4400 is roughly 350 GFLOPS. Drivers don't make up for it on that scale. Plus the 5757M isn't really 35W. Plus basically get half the battery life of a comparable Haswell machine.Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Oh I wasn't really thinking about that they included the CPU in the GFLOPS. That makes A10-6800k 779 GFLOPS or the 8670D 648 GFLOPS and this new GPU just 737 GFLOPS. Though it's probably not the highest SKU, and the 3.7GHz is not the turbo freq.silverblue - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
The worry appears to be that even at 856 GFLOPS, Kaveri is about 20% less powerful than previously touted. This article (with slides from AMD) shows Kaveri was originally meant to be at 1,050 GFLOPS, meaning a CPU clock speed reduction of 8%, but a dramatic GPU clock speed reduction of 25%. The assumption is based on the fact that the A10-7850K is the top Kaveri part, but that's a sound assumption.http://semiaccurate.com/2013/11/12/amd-misses-expe...
If this is true, it will barely outperform Trinity/Richland in synthetics, but we know those don't always matter. The real question now is - why is Kaveri less powerful than originally stated?
looncraz - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I think engineers over-estimated the performance increase with GCN 1.1 revisions or had to exclude an anticipated improvement to make their target dates... or power draw was more than expected...That could also explain why AMD was so unprepared with an updated cooler for the Hawaii GPUs...
Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
GCN 1.1 aka HD7790 has been out for a while and was retail before any pre-production ready engineerings samples of Kaveri.I think it's simply a matter of power and not the top sku possible. But that is symptomatic of AMD as that always happens way worse for the mainstream notebook chips. They cannot really keep doing that.
If you look at that AMD slide, Trinity is essentially where Richland ended up. So it's not GCN (1.1) specific really. A10-5800K was 736 GFLOPS. They said it would be 819 for the 2013 ed (Richland).
Wonder about the naming though, what comes after A10-7850K? XX90K?
jnad32 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Mantle is kind of a big deal if only because it gets rid of the need for DirectX. Yes OGL has been there for years but clearly not many companies like it or at least don't want to use it for some reason. If this can catch on and AMD starts actually paying attention to their Linux drivers, They could become the goto company for Steam OS and gamers who don't like Windows in general.dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Mantle is nothing at all like Direct X and could not possibly replace it as it doesn't have almost any features. Do you even understand what direct X is.ericore - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
The most important thing for me is, is this new APU less of a bottleneck for FPS in games; does it compete with Intel; because Intel irrefutably leads at the moment. If it does, then it's a sensible purchase. Otherwise, it's a deal breaker. I'm much more excited about Nvidia's Kepler or whatever they are release in May, and why would I choose an AMD cpu if even its new its already lagging, having difficulty with CPU bound games.monstercameron - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
can you not read? this is an apu, not a cpu this is where AMD leads. Worry about cpu perf when discrete cpus[if they are still a thing] launch and stop being silly.silverblue - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
It's still a valid question, especially considering the touted improvements over the Piledriver architecture.AMD shouldn't really compare IGP coverage areas with Intel's chips. For one, AMD's cores are smaller, and despite the 2MB L2 per module, there's no L3 to factor into the equation. The i7, as an example, should have far more transistors devoted to its CPU portion than the 2M/4T Steamroller would.
jnad32 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
That doesn't seem fair to compair a $300 CPU to a $150ish APU.dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Its only 300 because Intel can sell it for 300. The only difference between a $150 i5 and a i7 is all artificial (hyperthreading and depending on the skus, unlicked multiplier). The problem is that Intel's graphics are more efficient and have far less die space dedicated to them and their CPUs blow AMDs out the water.JDG1980 - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Assuming that PCWorld is correct, the clock speed regression is worrying: going back from 4.1 GHz to 3.7 GHz could wipe out a sizable portion of the IPC gains in lightly-threaded workloads. At least these APUs should perform more like a true quad-core chip due to the reduction of the CMT penalty.The server market is going to want a CPU-only product with more cores, at least six or eight. So are enthusiasts. Kaveri is a good mainstream product, but if AMD wants to get back high-margin business, it won't be enough on its own. It would make sense to unify both servers and high-end desktops on a single socket, like Intel did with LGA 2011; the existing AM3+ platform is getting a bit long in the tooth.
gonchuki - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Efficiency vs Brute Force. Intel scaled back from 3.4-ish ghz on the P4 to a mere 2.66 ghz on the Core 2 and they still won a huge performance increase, in a time where all loads were lightly threaded.Also agree with the AM3+ sentiment, they will definitely need at least a new chipset to get PCIe 3.0 support since their new GPUs in crossfire are now directly taxing the bus bandwidth.
extide - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
That is totally not a valid comparison. Yes, intel went to lower clock speed in the Core 2 vs the P4, but that is also talking about two totally different architectures, two totally different products. Here they are just talking about one product, one architecture, and a 3-400Mhz reduction in clock speed. Not even close to the same thing.Xcause - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
stolen from PS4... f***k you amd, logical sense, nvidia and intel FTW!Drumsticks - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
You realize AMD makes the CPU and GPU in the playstation four and the Xbox one... Right...Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Uh... what?SunLord - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
It's a special child don't stare to much its not politepiroroadkill - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
If it wasn't so stupid, it would almost be funny. No, it would just be tragic.How on earth is it stolen? Also, the GPU mentioned is still way less powerful than the PS4 one.
The CPU architecture is also totally different. One and PS4 just have a bunch of shitty Jaguar cores.
silverblue - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Eight K8-style cores will be fine if the workload is divvied out relatively well. Sony reckons the CPU is ten times faster than that of the PS3, but in the end, if so many tasks are being offloaded to dedicated sound and graphics hardware, I doubt it'll be a problem using those eight cores to balance out the remaining workload.silverblue - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Note: Sony may have said the PS4 was ten times faster than the PS3, and not necessarily the CPU itself. There's varying articles out there on the subject that mention it in the headline yet back away in the actual article.piroroadkill - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Oh, I'm not saying the PS4 itself is shitty, but each one of those cores has weak single thread performance even compared to Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture. Compared to common CPUs people have in their desktops, such as Ivy or Haswell, "Shitty" is fair to say for Jaguar in comparison.It means that the code will have to be heavily threaded. The GPU in the PS4 is all you could hope for in a console at that price point, though.
dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Fucking silvermont atom which uses a 1/4 the power and a whole lot less doe space is equal in performance to jaguar AMD its cheaper. Its fair to say jaguar is quite bad. The cyclone in A7 is equivilant in performance as well and that is a phone coremedi02 - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Care to post a link to the benches.akmittal - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
AMD APU's are always great at graphics performance but it stands nowhere near the computing power of intel CPU's. Power consumption will also be big factor as intel move to 14 nm fabrication.silverblue - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
If tasks are being split between the CPU and GPU cores then I don't see why AMD cannot catch up in some areas. With a 512-SP GPU behind FP calculations, there's no reason as to why Kaveri can't significantly outmanoeuvre even an i7 in specific circumstances. In two months, we may find this out.stickmansam - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
What would sell Kaveri would be the ability to use the GPU cores for FPU but still have something like an 7970/280x do the heavy lifting in gamesTuishimi - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
I have been thinking the same thing... that would be amazing!silverblue - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
It would require more power, but to provide the sort of FP power that an i7 produces could be achieved by having a small portion of the GPU power gated for such a purpose. As such, you could probably reduce clock speeds for the Steamroller cores for gaming in order to drop power usage back down.200380051 - Monday, December 30, 2013 - link
Mantle will enable developers to dispatch workloads in such a fashion, across multiple compute units. Even more so when HSA gains traction with anything non-games.medi02 - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
AMD was doing quite well in heavily multithreaded tasks though. (but not per watt)Also note that they've closed the gap with the recent generation.
With major consoles having 8 cores + most games being multi-plats, we will inevitably see AMD doing better CPU wise, as heavy multi-threading will become a norm.
UtilityMax - Sunday, December 15, 2013 - link
Which is fine for most laptop users. The current A10 flagship gives performance in the neighborhood of the Intel i3, while the APU graphics performance is in the neighborhood of an entry to mid-level discrete chip. The real problem though is that there aren't many great laptops out there with AMD APUs. Most AMD portables are in the budget category with slower APUs and below-average build quality.Morawka - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
The die size is gonna be huge on thisjljaynes - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
supposed to be ~richland size.gostan - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
can we stop using the name APU please?drexnx - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
considering that AMD renamed their developer summit to "APU2013", no, no they can't stop.SunLord - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Why? It's what amd calls there cpu+gpu combo...dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
So intel has had APUs for years and years.The Von Matrices - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
What silicon process will this be built upon? Will it be 32nm GlobalFoundries, 28nm TSMC, or 22nm GlobalFoundries?Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I believe it's 28nm.Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
28nm GF. Only small cores i.e. Jaguar and GPUs are TSMC at the moment.Mugur - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Is GF at 28nm? I only knew about 32. I thought that all 28nm CPU/APUs are TSMC only.On another hand, if GF is not ready soon for a die shrink, they can really close the gates...
tcube - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
They are, amd is taping out 20 and 14nm atm with gf... we might just see 14nm kaveri and 20nm r9-290x followers on the market q4 2014Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Kaveri will be replaced by a new socket and a Excavator-based CPU fairly soon around 14/15, depending on market, if they are serious my guess is we see Server first. No need for a shrink 12 months after they start to ship wafers to AMD in Malaysia. 20 nm TSMC gpu's should come with GCN2 or whatever displaces GCN 1.1 and SI/VI. That's sometimes next year.dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Btw GF 14nm and Samsung 14nm and I believe TSMC too maybe is actually 22/20, with finfet.Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Of course they are, they also moved to bulk this time for the AMD designs. Kaveri samples was from Dresden, but later on they can be fabbed in New York or Singapore too. They have many other customers, and I'm pretty sure they did do work on 28nm FD-SOI together with ST. They also work on 14 nm at the moment. They use the same tools and processes as other Common Platform partners, so it will be there at about the same time as on Samsung and IBM. They aren't a dinosaur and plenty of the mobile companies use them, and will use them.Da W - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I've Read 18nm over at Tom. But this may be a typo and mean 28nm.R3MF - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
very much want one of these.really keen on the dedicated SATAexpress/M.2pcie IO that kaveri+fm2+ is supposed to sport.
Da W - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
150$ APU89$ board
8GB 2133 RAM @ 65$
2TB HD @99$
BD drive @65$
=XBone-like power for 470$, choose your case +psu +OS at your liking. (if you're upgrading you already have those) Or this makes a NICE steambox.
It's getting there. Next gen APU + next node, we'll be talkin.
haukionkannel - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
2 CPU cores in the biggest version, or 4 cores if you count those integer cores too... So this should be allmost as fast as AMD 4300, but with huge GPU part... Actually not bad at all for APU!So we have to wait for 14nm or something until we will see 4 Core CPU in AMD APU. By then this can be really interesting!
inf64 - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
FX4300? 7850K based on SR core will just walk over that poor FX in CPU benchmarks :)dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Not really 10%-20% improvement tops. Regression in clock speed makes SR lose some of its advanrage.A5 - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
This APU has 33% less CUs than the XBone APU. It would be noticeably slower at most games.Next year's version, though...
andrewaggb - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I don't think it'll give xb-one like gpu performance without the embedded dram. Personally I think they should added that, or added triple or quad channel ddr3.That would probably give XB-One levels of performance, + mantle. Would be pretty cool for a cheap box.
aryonoco - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I hope AMD starts paying attention to their Linux drivers, in which case this could be a very good platform for a Steam Machine.If it is good, I might build a Kaveri-based Steam box next year, hopefully XBMC is up and running on SteamOS quickly, and if they can get the likes of Netflix to sign up as well, this would be my dream living room PC.
coder111 - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
Not sure if it's AMD (it employs several developers), or just pure volounteer effort, or other organizations like RedHat, but open-source AMD drivers are getting seriously good. They lag behind by a couple of OpenGL versions and it takes several releases until latest GPU is supported, but Open Source Radeon drivers are probably best open source drivers out there except for Intel.Arnulf - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Because this one APU that has been revealed runs at lower frequency (on GPU side) than initially planned. This doesn't mean that the top model will be limited to only 720 MHz (after all discrete desktop GCN models with identical/comparable unit count are closer to 900-1000 MHz with very reasonable TDP).Everybody keeps assuming that just because some article says this chip is top of the line Kaveri, this is actually the case. AMD came up with A8-3870 to follow up on 3850 in Llano generation and with faster ships in Trinity/Richland generation. It is reasonable to expect Kaveri chips that actually meet the 900 MHz projection which would put its GPU performance right at the 1000+ GFlops mark.
dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Not really. Those new versions were just slight tweaks woth binning and clock speed bumps. AMD simply could not put it to 750+ MHz without the thing reaching insane TDP.Arnulf - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
A10-7870Kdwade123 - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
People rather buy an Intel laptop with a discrete GPU than this crippled crap.MLSCrow - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
That is absolutely not true. I know many people who would buy a Kaveri over an Intel with discrete GPU. Not to bash Intel as I have all the respect in the world for them and their technologies, however, I definitely give about 10x more credit to AMD, because they are less than a 10th the size of Intel, their entire annual profits are less than Intel's R&D budget alone, and yet they are still able to come up with new, innovative products that are competitive with Intel, and which Intel is forced to copy as they are such great ideas. AMD came up with 64bit cpus first, multi-cores cpus first, APU's first, and now HSA as well as the first truly capable 3D directional audio technology, which they are including in Kaveri! People dont seem to realize that Kaveri isn't just a CPU, it's so much more and all on one chip. The result of which is that you can create an entire gaming PC for such a little amount of money. Not everyone has the cash to dish out for a 4770k, GTX Titan, and multi-hundred dollar sound card. Kaveri offers a nice quad core CPU (keep in mind that 3.7GHz is only what they are offering right out the gate. It is the early, rushed to market model. You can surely expect them to offer higher clocked, better binned versions in the future. I easily see 4GHz+ Kaveri to follow), a GPU that is as good as a low end discrete GPU, which is good enough to play just about everything, including the latest games (albeit at lower settings, but, possibly even at med+ settings if Mantle provides a decent enough boost in performance), and an awesome sound processor, all in one low cost part. With that, you can buy inexpensive and unobtrusive tiny form factor cases and build yourself a portable, respectable, little machine that will handle just about anything that most users will ask of it.The new Steamroller cores catch AMD up to Sandy Bridge levels, which to me, is finally an acceptable level of performance and finally a truly competitive position as opposed to before, so kudos to them for finally getting there, even though it's very late.
In all honesty, I'm torn on what to use for my next build. I'm interested in a 4770K, an FX8350 (there is upside now that games are finally using the additional cores, are being written specifically with AMD 8-core hardware in mind since they own the gaming industry now, and because Mantle may increase the value of the hardware), and then Kaveri. If HSA takes off, Kaveri will truly be a kickass little piece of technology.
If AMD just made an 8-core Steamroller FX chip, there wouldnt even be any contemplation for me in terms of what to buy. I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but sad face, I must keep my fingers crossed for a future 8c Steamroller or Excavator CPU.
TL;DR - Kaveri is a lot more than it seems, especially for those on a budget, and there are power users, such as myself, who would indeed consider Kaveri over other options as it offers so much for so little, all with the potential to be amazing if HSA takes off. There's almost nothing bad about Kaveri for what it is. People should keep their minds a bit more open with regard to this little gem.
formulav8 - Thursday, November 21, 2013 - link
Also, the gpu should be more discreet-like in performance. If I read the article correctly the gpu and cpu can now share the same address space. Which will reduce the need for memory bandwith since the gpu doesn't have to access everything through the cpu. So this should be a quick gpu inside this chip.Randas45 - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
Hope the apu A10 -7850k will allow the gpu r9 -270x to work with it for better performance!!! :)Fingers crossed!
ericore - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
The APU uses R7 graphics, so that might not work, but fingers crossed indeed.I just watched a video that shows the flagship kaveri run battlefield 4 1080 at minimum FPS of 28 (without mantle) on what looks like medium or medium low settings, but still looks great. Take your current A10-6800k, add 10FPS to the min FPS for a given game for Richland, 12 for trinity, and 15 FPS if you had the 256 SP APU and that's a good performance estimation of Kaveri; 15-20% improved single threaded performance, 128 more SPs, higher GPU clock, + still overclock-able albeit not as much, but you'll either be given the performance I state, or you'll be able to reach it.
sireangelus - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
I'm really hoping to see some test of this little beast with bf4 on mantle... i might buy one as a desktop for a gaming rig.Troxie - Monday, November 18, 2013 - link
now we are looking at apu's that might actually be usefull to casual gamers and power users alike, still not top end but we are almost at the end of the large form factor!boozzer - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link
this is why I am holding off on buying a new gaming laptop! can't wait for this!