AMD Kaveri APU Launch Details: Desktop, January 14th
by Ryan Smith on November 11, 2013 9:33 PM ESTKicking off today is AMD’s annual developer conference, which now goes by the name APU13. There will be several APU/CPU related announcements coming out of the show this week, but we’ll start with what’s likely to be the most interesting for our regular readers: the launch date for AMD’s Kaveri APU.
First and foremost, AMD has confirmed that Kaveri will be shipping in Q4’13, with a launch/availability date of January 14th, 2014. For those of you keeping track of your calendars, this is the week after CES 2014, with AMD promising further details on the Kaveri launch for CES.
Second of all, we have confirmation on what the highest shipping APU configuration will be. Kaveri will have up to 4 CPU core (2 modules), which will be based on AMD’s latest revision of their desktop CPU architecture, Steamroller. Meanwhile the GPU will be composed of 8 GCN 1.1 CUs, which would put the SP count at 512 SPs (this would be equivalent to today's desktop Radeon HD 7750). Furthermore AMD is throwing around a floating point performance number – 856 GFLOPS – which thanks to some details found in AMD's footnotes by PCWorld gives us specific clockspeeds and even a product name. A10-7850K CPU clockspeed 3.7GHz, GPU clockspeed 720MHz.
Third, in a departure from how AMD launched Trinity and Richland, Kaveri will be coming to the desktop first. The January 14th date is for the availability of desktop socket FM2+ Kaveri APUs, with server and mobile APUs to follow (these are presumably some of the CES details to come). Pricing and specific SKUs will of course be announced at a later time, and there wasn’t any clarification on whether this was just for OEM hardware, or if we’ll be seeing retail CPUs too.
Finally, AMD has confirmed on the GPU side that Kaveri will be shooting for feature parity with AMD’s latest discrete GPUs, by supporting many of the same features. Specifically, TrueAudio will be making an appearance on Kaveri, bringing AMD’s dedicated audio processing block to their APUs as well as their GPUs. On the discrete GPUs this is a move that was mostly about functionality, but on Kaveri it should take on a second role due to the fact that it’s exactly the kind of CPU-constrained environment for which having dedicated hardware will be a boon. Furthermore, AMD has also confirmed that their new low-level API, Mantle, will also be supported on Kaveri – it is after all a GCN based GPU.
For AMD Kaveri is going to be a big deal; likely the biggest CPU/APU launch for the company in quite some time. Since the acquisition of ATI all the way back in 2006 this is what the company has been building up to: producing a processor with a highly integrated CPU/GPU that allows both of them to be leveraged nearly-transparently by software. Kaveri is the launch vehicle for HSA both as a specific standard and as a general concept for a PC CPU/APU, so it’s something that everyone inside and outside of AMD will be watching closely.
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Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
28nm GF. Only small cores i.e. Jaguar and GPUs are TSMC at the moment.Mugur - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Is GF at 28nm? I only knew about 32. I thought that all 28nm CPU/APUs are TSMC only.On another hand, if GF is not ready soon for a die shrink, they can really close the gates...
tcube - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
They are, amd is taping out 20 and 14nm atm with gf... we might just see 14nm kaveri and 20nm r9-290x followers on the market q4 2014Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Kaveri will be replaced by a new socket and a Excavator-based CPU fairly soon around 14/15, depending on market, if they are serious my guess is we see Server first. No need for a shrink 12 months after they start to ship wafers to AMD in Malaysia. 20 nm TSMC gpu's should come with GCN2 or whatever displaces GCN 1.1 and SI/VI. That's sometimes next year.dylan522p - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Btw GF 14nm and Samsung 14nm and I believe TSMC too maybe is actually 22/20, with finfet.Penti - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Of course they are, they also moved to bulk this time for the AMD designs. Kaveri samples was from Dresden, but later on they can be fabbed in New York or Singapore too. They have many other customers, and I'm pretty sure they did do work on 28nm FD-SOI together with ST. They also work on 14 nm at the moment. They use the same tools and processes as other Common Platform partners, so it will be there at about the same time as on Samsung and IBM. They aren't a dinosaur and plenty of the mobile companies use them, and will use them.Da W - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I've Read 18nm over at Tom. But this may be a typo and mean 28nm.R3MF - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
very much want one of these.really keen on the dedicated SATAexpress/M.2pcie IO that kaveri+fm2+ is supposed to sport.
Da W - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
150$ APU89$ board
8GB 2133 RAM @ 65$
2TB HD @99$
BD drive @65$
=XBone-like power for 470$, choose your case +psu +OS at your liking. (if you're upgrading you already have those) Or this makes a NICE steambox.
It's getting there. Next gen APU + next node, we'll be talkin.
haukionkannel - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
2 CPU cores in the biggest version, or 4 cores if you count those integer cores too... So this should be allmost as fast as AMD 4300, but with huge GPU part... Actually not bad at all for APU!So we have to wait for 14nm or something until we will see 4 Core CPU in AMD APU. By then this can be really interesting!