“Near Production Samples” have been put through their paces

Oct 29, 2013 14:23 GMT  ·  By

It's still unclear when, exactly, Kaveri APUs will debut, whether this year or in 2014. On the other hand, we now actually know what the chips can do.

Kaveri will be the first accelerated processing unit utilizing the Steamroller CPU architecture and the GCN (Graphic Core Next) GPU Architecture.

Chinese websites like China DIY have managed to get a hold of an engineering sample and some “Near Production Samples” of the chip.

There wasn't an exploration of the graphics side, but the CPU cores were examined quite closely.

On the surface, it looks like a trade-off in performance, because of the 1.8 GHz clock and measly 2 MB cache that limits the Floating Point performance to 85% of AMD FX Bulldozer and Piledriver.

The Kaveri dominates in integer count though, being 30-32% better than its predecessors.

In layman terms, this means that, if not the next-generation Intel CPU, the AMD Kaveri will be able to match the Intel Haswell Core i7-4770K somewhat.