AMD will fling radical 'Kaveri' chips onto streets in January The desktop version of AMD's next-generation accelerated processing unit, an APU code named "Kaveri", will hit the streets on January 14, the company announced at its developers conference, APU13, in San José, California, on Monday evening. AMD's upcoming 'Kaveri' processor - overview Kaveri: AMD's next big thing …
What movement?
That is the whole idea - synchronized cache. You do not move anything any more and you do not wait for synchronization any more. A trivial barrier instruction of your choice causes a full sync.
AMD has been preparing for this for the last year or so (at least) - if you read the recent OpenCL specs they are written so that a lot of the instructions magically use a move if the underlying hardware does not support this and fall back to a NOP if it does. Previous specs were saying "copy", "synchronize", etc.. Current specs say "if needed".
A whole raft of things in networking and day-to-day OS tasks which was out of bounds for OpenCL because of the initial overhead to load/copy and synchronization overheads has just become feasible.
Hello Intel, Check, Check, Mate.
"it will have four CPU cores running at 3.7GHz, and eight GPU cores running at 720MHz each with 512 processing units."
It will have 4 CPU cores running at 3.7GHz. Correct.
It will have 8 GPU cores running at 720MHz. Correct.
Each GPU core has 512 processing units. INcorrect.
Each GPU core has 64 processing units (SIMDs). 8x64 =512.
"GFLOPS = CPU GFLOPS + GPU GFLOPS = CPU Core Freq (3.7 Ghz) x Core count (4) x 8 + GPU Core Freq (720MHz) x Radeon Core (512) x 2."
Going one step further, this equation indicates to me that each CPU core is capable of delivering 8 FLOP/clock and each Radeon processing unit does 2 FLOP/clock. If that is true they would be better off running 192 CPU cores at 720 MHz, getting 1.1 TFLOPS and be done with it but I'm guessing it isn't quite that easy.
Disirregardlessly, I'm looking forward to seeing these flogged. The icon is liquid cooling for the inevitable gramma nazi even though my gramma preferred scotch.
Kaveri is very cool and a landmark change in the PC environment as is obvious by the overwhelming industry support of it. Kaveri feeds all processing data to either the CPU or GPU based on which can process it faster/better. That combined with both the CPU/GPU being able to access the memory equally, it's a grand slam hit for AMD and their customers.
Too bad Nvidia and Intel are left out in the cold because these AMD APUs will be THE choice for virtually all platforms going forward from hand held portables to consoles, laptops, desktops and servers. This is a really big deal and many years in the making. Congrats to AMD. Bring it on!
I want some of whatever you're smoking. Yes, this is a cool technology, but it's not a lot different from what is done in the mobile space (where both NVIDIA and Intel play). Even when AMD clearly had the better parts, was first to 1GHz, first to 64 bit, and was crushing Intel on all the benchmarks, they didn't manage to translate that into market leadership. Now, a lot of that is because intel are cunning bastards with an enormous amount of business inertia making their position hard to attack, but that hasn't changed any in the last 10 years.
Just how sad do you have to be to be a CPU fanboi? Whilst Im all for a resurgent AMD posting fud and wishful thinking isn't going to make it so.
I can't help feel that AMD is still focusing too much on matching Intels speeds and performance when the bulk of the market now needs performance per watt - something AMD are still massively lagging at.
I bought my first Haswell (i5) laptop a few weeks ago, and this thing is downright impressive. Fastest laptop I've ever used, and I've never heard a fan blowing or felt a bit of heat from it once. And the thing has two batteries (one in the monitor, one in the keyboard), and runs for 11+ hours. And the price was just $829.
This is what all us business travelers were begging for 10-12 years ago.
I have been an AMD user for years now. This is being typed on my old workhorse with a Phenom II X6 1090T. Since that chip came out, AMD stuff has been a bit of a disappointment. I have an A10 5800 4 core, 4.3GHz machine here and it is OK, but not great. I also have a couple of notebooks with AMD CPUs and a couple of other boxen all sporting some form of AMD CPU. It is all pretty uninspiring. My old i7 notebook here is not spectacular in this group, but it keeps up.
I have been holding off upgrading my workstation until AMD comes up with something compelling enough. So far it has not and this announcement is not doing much for me either. We will see how it does in reviews when it comes out, but it is hard to see how this will get me to move.
It is a shame how this has unfolded. I had high hopes for fusing the CPU and GPU because in an ideal world you could scale some jobs *way up* by laying stuff off on the GPU. So far, it has not looked promising. AMD has some great ideas, but they are really behind in terms of execution.
I would like to see more CPU cores and higher clock speeds. Although it does not make intuitive sense to me, in practice Intel's hyperthreading makes a lot of difference. I would like to see AMD squeeze something like that out too. I may not be an ordinary user, but I am not exactly exotic. I would really like to upgrade to AMD but am beginning to drift over the dark side for the performance.
Sigh. I am also crossing my fingers, but so far I am a bit pessimistic....
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