AMD Next-Gen Kaveri APU Shipments Slip To 2014 138
MojoKid writes "The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that AMD's 3rd generation APU won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the beginning of the fourth quarter. What the company is saying now is that while Kaveri will ship to manufacturers in late 2013, it won't actually hit shelves until 2014. The reason Kaveri was late taping out, according to sources, was that AMD kept the chip back to put some additional polish on its performance. Unlike Piledriver, which we knew would be a minor tweak to the core Bulldozer architecture, Steamroller, Kaveri's core architecture, is the first serious overhaul to that hardware. That means it's AMD's first chance to really fix things. Piledriver delivered improved clock speeds and power consumption, but CPU efficiency barely budged compared to 'Dozer. Steamroller needs to deliver on that front."
Re:OMG four whole months to wait. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Greater power efficiency please (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD and to a lesser extent, Intel, are misreading the mass market. What everybody else except those hardcore GamerZ (rhymes with lamers) want isn't more "powerful" desktop systems that consume enough watts to power a third world household with room to spare but more power efficient APUs, aka SoCs or systems on a chip. I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips.
How has Intel misread the market? Ivy Bridge was Sandy Bridge with much lower load power. Haswell is Ivy Bridge with much lower idle power. True, Intel is still struggling to compete in the smartphone/tablet segment that is dominated by ARM, but Haswell is far superior to past Intel chips when it comes to power consumption.
Re:OMG four whole months to wait. (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that you can get an 8 core, 4 GHz CPU for $200 is a big plus for some people.
I guess, for the people who like big numbers never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC. The FX-8350 has a single threaded performance equal to the Phenom II X6 1100T and Intel Pentium G840, it can win some multi-threaded tests because price wise it competes against Intel's hyperthreading-crippled processors but it's no impressive chip. But at least it sucks less than the FX-8150 , which really was the worst of Bulldozer.
Re:oh noooo (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to see what these chips do for engineering simulations. In simulation software there is a lot of back and forth between parts that can be done on a gpu for a huge performance gain to parts that work best on a cpu. The problem is that mostly you end up running them pure cpu only because the overhead of handing off to the gpu and getting a result back is so high. Kaveri is the first chip I know of that can do a zero copy transfer between the gpu and cpu. It may not be great for all apps but it should be AMAZING for engineering sims if they are modified to take advantage of it.
Some of the papers I read found that on simulations large enough for the gpu to make a difference you could get a 50x performance increase and theoretically it should have been around 200x or so but the overhead of loading and retrieving the data was still very large.
Re:OMG four whole months to wait. (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
But in any event, I think the really important point is in the end of this article - http://hothardware.com/News/Praying-For-Consoles-AMD-Details-2013-Game-Plan-Offers-Updates-on-New-APU-Performance/ [hothardware.com] - AMD is banking its future on the APUs in embedded applications, low end laptops, and consoles. Unless they get into tablets and mobile devices in big ways, I think they're planning to grow their share of a market that's shrinking rapidly. "King of console processors" is meaningless if 90% of the demographic that played Xbox360 in 2005 is playing on an iPad in 2020.
Re:Greater power efficiency please (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically, you havent looked at Intel CPUs of the past 2 years at all, right?
Re:OMG four whole months to wait. (Score:5, Insightful)
ARM is a threat to Intel in the near future and indirectly. People are gravitating towards tablets and smartphones instead of buying deaktops. However, those of us that actually need desktops today have only Intel and AMD to turn to, and Intel's margins are too high and their products are too artificially crippled for my tastes, which is why I sincerely root for AMD's success.
Re:oh noooo (Score:1, Insightful)
An unnecessarily overpowered chip will be delayed, so more of the hardware features no one asked for will be delivered to a market that usually works in symbiosis with the Microsoft inefficiency treadmill but is now being destroyed entirely by that same company.
Why don't you wait for it to come out before criticizing it. AMD is in trouble and it would hurt us all including the intel fan boys who are reading these comments if AMD is gone.
I noticed Intel is already raising prices on the newer I7s for no other reason that they think there is no competition as everyone bashes them in every tech website.
Steamroller is actually slower than the older Phenom II per clock cycle and is a crappy chip. That is true. I still own a phenom II but my crappy mobo is showing its age as it is downclocked to only 2.6 ghz. But it runs VMWare Workstation with its x6 core processor very competitively! I mean it can trounce a x4 icore7 easily from the same time period 2010ish in parrallel processing!
Want hardware virtualization iwth that intel processor? Oh, you need a special bios unlocked for $$$ more money (as much as my whole machine at $599!) AMD would never do this.
Remember Intel fanboys that even Intel had crappy chips out there such as 486sx, buggy pentiums, and of course the Pentium IV. The mistake for Steamroller were :-( FYI they are not true cores like Intels or the older Phenom IIs.
1. Everyone would be using a tablet by now and would like smooth graphics like the Iphone has had for 5 years in which PCs still do not do right with smooth scroll thanks to XP support and crappy integrated chipsets
2. The APU would be faster than any 7990 as the ram controller would be on the card with instant low latency! Turns out that wasn't true as complications got in the way of that
3. AMD had done right iwth the Phenom II was great multicore and parrallel performance. SteamRoller has all its cores share cache and a central FPU
I was hoping these last 2 issues would be fixed in Kaveri. AMD is in trouble and its ATI cards can't keep them afloat forever. Nvidia is being very aggressive with Kepler in that department.