14 DAY TRIAL // The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) always takes place in the early half of January, and Advanced Micro Devices naturally wants to participate. So it has made sure its next range of accelerated processing units is ready for it.
AMD also holds an annual developer conference in the fourth quarter, and the latest edition kicked off just yesterday, November 11.
It so happens that the Kaveri accelerated processing unit line was one of the main topics of discussion at this APU13 gathering.
The company not only revealed the specification of the top APU in the range, but also said for when, exactly, availability is scheduled.
Apparently, retailers will begin to carry out orders on January 14. Shipments will begin before then though, this quarter in fact (Q4 2013).
It makes sense this would happen: AMD will ship A-Series APUs to its various PC partners, as well as retailers, but wants to show them off at CES 2014 first, to ensure it has a good starting ramp. January 14 is right during the week after CES, after all.
Now for the top-tier AMD A-Series Kaveri chip, which will replace the A10-6800K from the current-generation Richland line.
First off, it marks a change in AMD's tactics, so to speak. Trinity and Richland made it to laptops first, then to desktops, but Kaveri will go the other way around.
The A10-7850K APU is a quad-core unit (2 modules) based on the Steamroller desktop architecture and featuring a Radeon GPU supposedly on par with the Radeon HD 7750 add-in card, but with current-generation perks like TrueAudio and support for AMD Mantle.
Thus, it has 8 GCN 1.1 (GraphicsCore Next) CUs (compute units), leading to a stream processor count (SP) of 512. The floating point performance number is of 856 GFLOPS.
AMD's desktop Kaveri A-Series APUs will go in FM2+ sockets and will be followed by server and mobile chips later down the line. Maybe CES 2014 will bring some info on them, like APU13 brought us the data on the PC flagship product.
