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AMD Kaveri APU Arriving For Desktop PCs in Q4 2013 – Kaveri Graphics Demonstrated With New Virtual R

The 7750 isn't too bad. Games at highish settings at 1080p are playable (30fps+), all fine at medium settings. You'd need 7850 performance for it to be good by ocuk forum standards :)
 
7750 isn't a massive leap over what we can see with a clocked Richland IGP and super fast RAM though.

With this being GCN 2.0 etc, we're unreasonably expecting more.
 
The Richland A10 overclocked with 2133MHz RAM can outperform a 6670, but it can't reach a 7750. I'd be surprised (but impressed) if Kaveri can get higher than a 7770.
 
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I guess, I just get unrealistic ideas as people seem to go over the top with the IGP performance.

If it hits 7750 performance, it's definitely good.
 
As Richland can manage 6670 performance, 7750 performance would be the next logical step. It's certainly possible it will be faster than that, but if it can outdo a 7770 it's going to shake things up.

ocuk told me they've got FM2+ boards in before the end of the month, so I'll be getting one for my A10.
 
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What will be interesting is FM2+ boards in the wild. TBH (and I've been banging this drum for over a year) there is no point for AMD to place GCN or more shader cores into any APU without an overhaul the memory subsystem - there just isn't enough bandwidth, as demonstrated by Trinity/Richland memory speed scaling. The internet rumour machine sprung into life and declared GDDR5 to be the answer. It certainly is in the PS4, but that's a closed box, tightly integrated device and soldering some GDDR5 packages to the board is not a challenge. In the PC market, there is no off the shelf GDDR5, and putting it on a DIMM loses it's massive advantage and incurs additional latency, putting it beyond useful and prohibitively expensive. Perhaps the final option to really gain some BW ground would be quad channel memory, but thus far all FM2+ boards cite dual channel...
 
Trinity and Richland were more like 6570 performance than 6670. All the benches I've seen put the iGP firmly behind the 6670, even with fast ram. The 7750 is significantly better.

The expectation is that Kaveri will be something like 7730 performance, which puts it above 6670, but behind 7750. That's pretty impressive, but probably not enough to ditch a dedicated GPU for gamers. Enough to at least play things like Crysis 3 and Metro:LL, though, and medium settings on BF3.

The big thing with Kaveri is the CPU cores. If the update can sort out the IPC towards something like Sandy performance (requiring perhaps a 15-20% improvement from Trinity/Richland), then Kaveri might be pretty mindblowing. A shame that 6-cores isn't feasible on FM2+, though.
 
I suppose the point is that the 6670 is rather more bandwidth constrained than is the IGP.

The core setup favours the 6670, being 480 shaders to the [A10] IGP's 384. And they're both VLIW4.

Coincidentally, the 7730 also contains 384 shaders - this time of GCN flavour. Since Kaveri is to use GCN, it makes some sense that we will see 7730 levels of performance.

Fast Ram gives a little more bandwidth to the IGP than DDR3 versions of the 7730 enjoy, so Kaveri should marginally outperform a DDR3 7730, but be behind the GDDR5 7730.
 
cheesyboy said:
The big thing with Kaveri is the CPU cores. If the update can sort out the IPC towards something like Sandy performance (requiring perhaps a 15-20% improvement from Trinity/Richland), then Kaveri might be pretty mindblowing. A shame that 6-cores isn't feasible on FM2+, though.
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So about 6 months and only dual/quad core?

Man, currently this is looking like a poor timeframe to upgrade.
 
Th0nt said:
So about 6 months and only dual/quad core?

Man, currently this is looking like a poor timeframe to upgrade.
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I wouldn't say so. Imagine if the Steamroller cores on Kaveri are Sandy-esq: you could get something equivalent to a i5-2500k with an onboard 6670/7730 GPU for around £120. That's pretty awesome.

Then imagine they release an FX Steamroller line (still unconfirmed). That would mean 6 and 8-core Sandy equivalents for maybe £200. That's Sandy-e performance and cores.

Of course, that does all rely on a 15-20% IPC boost from Streamroller :rolleyes:
 
Needs more than 15-20 to match Sandy (Except in those exceptions where SB's instruction sets are lacking)

Even then, 15-20% is still a decent gain with a half decent IGP.
An 8 core with 15-20% over PD will still be very impressive though.

But it's not Sandy IPC.
 
cheesyboy said:
I wouldn't say so. Imagine if the Steamroller cores on Kaveri are Sandy-esq: you could get something equivalent to a i5-2500k with an onboard 6670/7730 GPU for around £120. That's pretty awesome.

Then imagine they release an FX Steamroller line (still unconfirmed). That would mean 6 and 8-core Sandy equivalents for maybe £200. That's Sandy-e performance and cores.

Of course, that does all rely on a 15-20% IPC boost from Streamroller :rolleyes:
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That's a lot of if and buts and a fair bit imagination :D
 
Really we can't be sure as to how well the GPU cores will fare. What we do know is that the GCN cores in Kaveri are far less memory bandwidth sensitive than the old VLIW4 cores.
 
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