14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices will only release the Kaveri desktop accelerated processing units in 2014, but the processors have already been detailed by the company, albeit in an unofficial capacity.
The folks at ProHardware.hu have managed to get a hold of some slides with information on the successors to the Richland A-Series 6000 APUs.
There are tables of information, logos, charts and diagrams for us to feast our eyes upon.
Advanced Micro Devices intends to introduce the new collection with the A10-7850K and A10-7700K quad-core processors.
The Kaveri GPU has 512 stream processors (8 GCN units), 8 ROPs, 32 TMUs, TrueAudio technology, DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, Mantle and 4K video.
A10-7850 runs at 3.7 GHz / 4 GHz and 720 MHz for the GPU (it's unlocked, for max overclocking). The A10-7700K, meanwhile, is a 3.5 / 3.8 GHz unit with 384 stream processors (6 compute units), 24 TMUs and 720 MHz GPU clock.
Although at this point it's a bit incorrect to call them quad-core chips, even if each of them has two Piledriver dual-core modules.
After all, the majority of the die surface is taken up by the graphics GCN stream processors (Graphics Core Next), not the x86 cores.
Well, it's really just 47%, but the rest is split between the CPU cores, the PCI Express 3.0 controller, the Display controller, and the hUMA shared memory controller.
It goes to show that the Sunnyvale, California-based company is putting even more emphasis on the graphics side of things.
It has a good reason for this, however, namely that hUMA controller mention above (heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access), a technology that allows the CPU and GPU to access the same portion of memory simultaneously.
This basically removes the lag normally incurred when the CPU has to jump through some software hoops to allow the GPU to process data.
In normal CPU queuing, a CPU has to use an OS service to dispatch tasks to the GPU. With hUMA, the GPU doesn't need to be spoofed, so to speak, allowing that massive parallel processing capability to be used fully.
They will have prices of $150 / €150 and will settle in FM2+ motherboards (black sockets with thicker pins).
