AMD Carrizo APU Massive Leak – 40W TDP, Excavator Cores, 512 SP and Assorted Benchmarks

strumpusplunket · 2 Dec 2014 at 14:00

I don't think all products in the computer component market need to be exciting. I want excitement in my higher-end gaming set-ups, sure - but everywhere else I just want functionality, quiet, efficiency and a good price/performance balance - all of which the APUs provide.

I am a bit concerned to see all this about AMD pulling back from expanding and refreshing their line-ups though, as I'd really like to see some future chips pushing the potential life of the FM2+ platform as a low-power budget gaming/media option. Here's hoping there are a few more Kaveri chips to come, or that the newer architectures fit the FM2+ socket...

humbug · 2 Dec 2014 at 15:07

Now the company plans to withdraw from the market of mainstream desktop chips

Is that official? its just a blanket statement with no references, pinch of salt folks, this is just bad journalism

meldarthx · 2 Dec 2014 at 15:36

humbug said:
Is that official? its just a blanket statement with no references, pinch of salt folks, this is just bad journalism

This is Kit.......they made their name on bad journalism along with trying to shame gamers....they made the list of never going there again as they are full of crap

ALXAndy · 2 Dec 2014 at 15:50

Yeah the Pentium is more of a toy than an actual serious CPU. It just gives those on a budget something to overclock but it is too little too late.

I've got one. Not set it up yet but I only bought it for the laughs really. It won't have much to do. Old emus and some media (BR rips).

Bonus of course is that the Pentium actually has an ITX board. I'd be AMD all the way at this price point otherwise.

humbug · 2 Dec 2014 at 15:55

meldarthx said:
This is Kit.......they made their name on bad journalism along with trying to shame gamers....they made the list of never going there again as they are full of crap

Yeah, Kit are like the Tabloids in mainstream journalism.

Desktop CPU's and APU's are a significant market for AMD, i can't see them pulling out of something that is contributing to their revenues.

"AMD are pulling out of Desktop's" what really? any references to that? a song on the wind? anything at all?!?!?! no?

bru · 2 Dec 2014 at 15:59

humbug said:
Is that official? its just a blanket statement with no references, pinch of salt folks, this is just bad journalism

I do hope your right as AMD pulling out of that part of the market is not good news for anyone.

bru · 2 Dec 2014 at 16:03

ALXAndy said:
Yeah the Pentium is more of a toy than an actual serious CPU. It just gives those on a budget something to overclock but it is too little too late.

I've got one. Not set it up yet but I only bought it for the laughs really. It won't have much to do. Old emus and some media (BR rips).

Bonus of course is that the Pentium actually has an ITX board. I'd be AMD all the way at this price point otherwise.

Hehe, funny how each person views things differently and don't get me wrong I'm not saying your right, wrong or anything at all. But it is nice to see an Intel chip being thought of as the budget option.

eddyr · 2 Dec 2014 at 16:50

'Withdrawing from the mainstream desktop market' was a slightly sensationalist editors note. The article was about Carrizo with excavator cores not intending to be aimed at desktop level computing from the off.

I interpret that realistically as the desktop not being a priority so don't expect parts intended to be 65-95 TDP APU replacements. Nothing stops them releasing excess stock onto the fm2 platform and bumping the volts on a 35w TDP part to gain a few extra 100's of MHz for the base clock, unleashing the boost limit and it being their new 95w model of course.

bru · 2 Dec 2014 at 16:58

Mrjobby said:
I find APUs so

Meh CPU with a Meh GPU added on.

Have their place (AM1 stuff is fun!) but not exciting.

I think this sums it up unfortunately, imagine if APU's were advertised as...

'The Intel 4790K the worlds fastest APU which is fully overclockable, can be faster than the enthusiast chips, with the power to rip through even the toughest games.' ( oh dear starting to sound like a kitchen cleaner ad :eek:

)

The sad thing is the above isn't even wrong, they would just need to add a disclaimer, something like ' just add a discrete GPU as the on board one sucks balls'.

It does seem that you can have an APU with a blinding CPU portion and naff GPU or one with ok GPU and naff CPU, and if AMD are going to pull out/back from this market segment, then we are not going to ever see that nirvana of a very good CPU with very good GPU as well.

Maybe its is because we (here on the forum) are near the top of the enthusiast tree that we want more than the industry can give, I dunno, but it does seem that the whole APU idea has come up a little short on what was promised. But maybe even that is just thinking of what we would like rather than of what we actually need.

Disclaimer: once again this is in no way a dig at AMD, seeing as Intel produce more APU's in their range than AMD do and AMD produce more CPU's (chips without integrated graphics)just my observations on the whole APU market.

humbug · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:03

If the iGPU is crap and doesn't support HSA then its not really an APU, its a CPU with onboard Graphics.

humbug · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:16

This is an example of the point of an APU, the CPU (serial compute part) is not really the important half, what matters is the GPU, or (parallel compute) part of the APU, its the "Accelerated" bit of the "Accelerated Processing Unit" that gives it its performance.

Bonjour · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:24

Most impressive.

I'd certainly be considering a Mini-ITX kaveri build if I were building a computer for someone whom gaming wasn't a primary concern.

bru · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:33

humbug said:
If the iGPU is crap and doesn't support HSA then its not really an APU, its a CPU with onboard Graphics.

LOL, sorry but that is just rubbish.

AMD shipped the worlds first APU back in 2011, or are you saying that AMD are wrong to Invent, build, advertise and sell the worlds first APU's until the HSA variants came along. :rolleyes:

Source

bru · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:36

humbug said:
This is an example of the point of an APU, the CPU (serial compute part) is not really the important half, what matters is the GPU, or (parallel compute) part of the APU, its the "Accelerated" bit of the "Accelerated Processing Unit" that gives it its performance.

I'm not saying that the new APU's are bad in anyway at all, they are a great step forward, but to say that anything before it isn't really an APU is just plain wrong.

Davedree · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:43

I don't understand why some people on here struggle to understand what an apu is really about. I mean we've talked about it in enough threads, it's simply not just a meh cpu and a meh gpu for gaming purposes. It's about cpu-gpu compute and sharing memory instructions between the two. Take a look at the ps4 or in recent for amd in the last couple of years their plans to implement hsa as fully coherent memory access between cpu-gpu. This was met by Kaveri and Carrizo will improve the scheduling and address switching for refinement in computational multithreading. For Amd it's their last spin before Zen comes along.
And Llano was just a testing ground for implementing the cpu and igp onto one die. Intel just glued their igp on seperately initially.

Unfortunately though as we've discussed many a time before, the main architecture of Kaveri is still yet to be shine in everyday software situations.

bru · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:49

Davedree said:
I don't understand why some people on here struggle to understand what an apu is really about. I mean we've talked about it in enough threads, it's simply not just a meh cpu and a meh gpu for gaming purposes. It's about cpu-gpu compute and sharing memory instructions between the two. Take a look at the ps4 or in recent for amd in the last couple of years their plans to implement hsa as fully coherent memory access between cpu-gpu. This was met by Kaveri and Carrizo will improve the scheduling and address switching for refinement in computational multithreading. For Amd it's their last spin before Zen comes along.
And Llano was just a testing ground for implementing the cpu and igp onto one wafer. Intel just glued their igp on seperately initially.

Unfortunately though as we've discussed many a time before, the main architecture of Kaveri is still yet to be shine in everyday software situations.

So just to get this straight, you are also saying that the Llano wasn't an APU, even though AMD disagree with you.

At this rate we might as well say that Kavari isn't an APU because better ones will be along sometime in the future.

(unless AMD pull out completely, or Intel don't finally get the act together.)

Boomstick777 · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:53

eddyr said:
'Withdrawing from the mainstream desktop market' was a slightly sensationalist editors note.

Not really, AMD haven't released a true desktop CPU successor to the FX chips since 2012, we're now going into 2015, so it isn't sensationalist to say AMD have withdrawn from the desktop market. They have so it's a fact. We're looking at 2016 for something new from AMD. Four years...

If the desktop APU lines don't get a new arch in 2015 (Carrizo), then AMD have withdrawn there as well. They have to do what's financially viable for them as a company, doesn't mean we have to like it.

Davedree · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:55

bru said:
So just to get this straight, you are also saying that the Llano wasn't an APU, even though AMD disagree with you.

At this rate we might as well say that Kavari isn't an APU because better ones will be along sometime in the future. (unless AMD pull out completely, or Intel don't finally get the act together.)

Where did I say that? I know my stuff don't make me out to be stupid,
All apu's have evolved over time, but only since trinity have they adopted instruction sets that follow the Hsa standards.

Llano was unable to share memory data between cpu-gpu, Kaveri was the first to be able to do so.

Davedree · 2 Dec 2014 at 17:57

Amd are just holding out for a year, Kaveri failed to reach laptops and mobile devices on a large scale. So maye this year we might see a great shift towards working with oems and laptops.

humbug · 2 Dec 2014 at 18:17

bru said:
LOL, sorry but that is just rubbish.

AMD shipped the worlds first APU back in 2011, or are you saying that AMD are wrong to Invent, build, advertise and sell the worlds first APU's until the HSA variants came along.

Source

Llano was a CPU + Onboard Graphics with APU ambitions, but it was not an APU as the iGPU's cache was not interconnected.

The CPU and iGPU were separate entities, it might as well have been an Athlon X4 + HD 6450 Discrete GPU.

There, i said it.