"The reality is quite clear by now: AMD isn't going to solve its CPU performance issues with anything from the Bulldozer family. What we need is a replacement architecture, one that I suspect we'll get after Excavator concludes the line in 2015. "
And from the last paragraph I took that it would be a good CPU for a budget gaming box.
One of the prominent features of Kaveri we will be
looking into is its HSA (Heterogenous System
Architecture) – the tight coupling of CPU and GPU,
extending all the way down to the programming model. Gone
are the days when CPU and GPU cores have to be treated
like independent inequals, with tons of data copies back
and forth for both types of cores to cooperate on the
same problem. With Kaveri, both CPU and GPU are treated
as equal class citizens, capable of working on the same
data in the same place in memory. It'll be a while before
we see software take advantage of Kaveri's architecture,
and it's frustrating that the first HSA APU couldn't have
come with a different CPU, but make no mistake: this is a
very big deal.
I wonder what has happened to the Bulldozer design team at AMD at this point and whether or not they even still work there at all.
I remember reading an article a while back re: changes from hand-drawn manual layout to automated layout methods for the chips. The assertion was that manual layout is often better for compute performance, while automated layout makes more efficient use of die area.
AMD, of course, spun off GlobalFoundries years ago and now pays a 3rd party to fab their processors. They also led the charge to incorporate graphics cores into the same die, and modern GPUs are very transistor-intensive.
Basically, I would not be surprised if this is as much about process as it is about design.
Boils down to: Kaveri itself is a nice evolution from the previous APUs and offers healthy performance gains and the lower end model matches performance of previous top APUs at lower power consumption. CPU performance is largely unchanged and they wont be able to challenge Intel with the Bulldozer architecture which will be around until 2015. Its a very nice APU for Desktops that need some gaming/gpu chops, but nothing revolutionary as the Intel CPUs with integrated Iris Pro are in the same league when it comes to GPU performance and even outperform the Kaveri in many benchmarks.
HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) has a lot of potential and could be a model for the future, if that works out with the market adopting remains to be seen though.
However, it is sort of silly to compare the extremely expensive $400+ (they are expensive to make too) Iris Pro CPUs with Kaveri.
It is much more reasonable to compare CPU and GPU performance to mainstream chips like i5-4570 which have 4600 graphics.
Just wanted to give the perspective that, while the performance is pretty good, its not the fastest on-die gpu.
I bought a Thuban Phenom II X4 and an hd5750 about five years ago. If I had known then that AMD would refuse ever again to sell me a CPU with IPC that good, I would have sprung for an X6. In other words AMD can't compete with it's own 5 year old products. An 1100T now sells for more on ebay than a new Vishera; apparently the market has decided that it's more valuable.
Anand's reviewers (Cutress and Garg) almost admit as much, saying "Kaveri is just another iteration of AMD’s APU line up that focuses purely on the integrated graphics side of things, while slowly improving the CPU side back to Thuban levels of performance."
It seems like Kaveri, and AMDs previous APUs in general, are perversely configured so that they don't make sense for any usage case.
--The marketing pushes desktop gaming, but it's worse than most low end GPUs (and old GPUs too).
--It's not an upgrade to my five year old desktop CPU. It's probably worse at lightly threaded performance then similarly priced intel products which are, curiously, not included in this review...
--Apparently most mobile Kaveri will have a 35 watt TDP. If it's turns out like mobile Richland, you'll be lucky to find one anyway. There are 1597 laptops on newegg right now, 9 have high end A10s, and they are all huge.
If they die shrunk Thuban, I would buy it. If they put more cores on Kaveri, I would buy that. If someone would put an A10 in a laptop that wasn't a huge, cheap, POS, I might even buy that. But so far they won't.
So who is this for?
Mobile might be appealing if we care more about gaming than work or battery life, but at this point it's not clear how available it will be. As a programmer, I like the idea of unified memory but that's not a selling point for customers. A friend of mine has a laptop with a recent APU, and she just figured out that it's too slow for minecraft. Telling her about hUMA did not make the sad face go away, true story.
The only place APUs looks good is for desktop gamers who don't have a desktop already, and can't afford better, even by a few measly bucks. I'm not even sure that they wouldn't be better off with a Haswell Pentium and and $50 GPU for the same price, but Anandtech won't tell us...
Did no one else notice that Anandtech's review is posted in the site's "AMD Center", and is "presented by AMD"? I call shenanigans. And people in this thread are calling Anandtech one of the best hardware sites on the the net... Now I'm depressed.
Confusing, and of course the meanings reverse with "lower-is-better" graphs.
The way I usually see to show normalized performance is normalizing to 100 rather than 0. An example, normalizing on the A10-6700:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/M/1/387001/original/Average-per...
"AMD launches Kaveri processors aimed at starting a computing revolution (venturebeat.com)"
