AMD Kaveri APU Launch Details: Desktop, January 14th
by Ryan Smith on November 11, 2013 9:33 PM ESTKicking off today is AMD’s annual developer conference, which now goes by the name APU13. There will be several APU/CPU related announcements coming out of the show this week, but we’ll start with what’s likely to be the most interesting for our regular readers: the launch date for AMD’s Kaveri APU.
First and foremost, AMD has confirmed that Kaveri will be shipping in Q4’13, with a launch/availability date of January 14th, 2014. For those of you keeping track of your calendars, this is the week after CES 2014, with AMD promising further details on the Kaveri launch for CES.
Second of all, we have confirmation on what the highest shipping APU configuration will be. Kaveri will have up to 4 CPU core (2 modules), which will be based on AMD’s latest revision of their desktop CPU architecture, Steamroller. Meanwhile the GPU will be composed of 8 GCN 1.1 CUs, which would put the SP count at 512 SPs (this would be equivalent to today's desktop Radeon HD 7750). Furthermore AMD is throwing around a floating point performance number – 856 GFLOPS – which thanks to some details found in AMD's footnotes by PCWorld gives us specific clockspeeds and even a product name. A10-7850K CPU clockspeed 3.7GHz, GPU clockspeed 720MHz.
Third, in a departure from how AMD launched Trinity and Richland, Kaveri will be coming to the desktop first. The January 14th date is for the availability of desktop socket FM2+ Kaveri APUs, with server and mobile APUs to follow (these are presumably some of the CES details to come). Pricing and specific SKUs will of course be announced at a later time, and there wasn’t any clarification on whether this was just for OEM hardware, or if we’ll be seeing retail CPUs too.
Finally, AMD has confirmed on the GPU side that Kaveri will be shooting for feature parity with AMD’s latest discrete GPUs, by supporting many of the same features. Specifically, TrueAudio will be making an appearance on Kaveri, bringing AMD’s dedicated audio processing block to their APUs as well as their GPUs. On the discrete GPUs this is a move that was mostly about functionality, but on Kaveri it should take on a second role due to the fact that it’s exactly the kind of CPU-constrained environment for which having dedicated hardware will be a boon. Furthermore, AMD has also confirmed that their new low-level API, Mantle, will also be supported on Kaveri – it is after all a GCN based GPU.
For AMD Kaveri is going to be a big deal; likely the biggest CPU/APU launch for the company in quite some time. Since the acquisition of ATI all the way back in 2006 this is what the company has been building up to: producing a processor with a highly integrated CPU/GPU that allows both of them to be leveraged nearly-transparently by software. Kaveri is the launch vehicle for HSA both as a specific standard and as a general concept for a PC CPU/APU, so it’s something that everyone inside and outside of AMD will be watching closely.
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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.