14 DAY TRIAL // Kaveri is the codename of the next-generation mobile accelerated processing unit platform that Advanced Micro Devices will release in 2014. Now we know exactly what it can do, assuming that a certain leaked slide is genuine.
AMD tried to enter the laptop and tablet markets this year, but it didn't manage much on that front, not with comparably strong ARM (NVIDIA Tegra especially) and even Intel SoCs on the market.
Kaveri promises to reach a good energy efficiency though, of 15W to 35W power envelopes, making laptop use far more comfortable for PC makers.
So, naturally, people around the globe have been keeping eyes on the Internet for any leak and report on this matter.
This is an example of an instance where that watchfulness pans out. The folks at ExtremeSpec website have found a presentation slide.
It looks genuine enough we suppose, although where it says “PCI Express” on the diagram, the writing is a bit skewed.
The slide shows that the AMD Kaveri 2.0 platform will have four cores, via two dual-core x86 Steamroller modules (two integer units per module).
There will be 512 stream processors as well, distributed across eight GCN compute units (Graphics Core Next).
Then there's the FPU (floating point unit) with two 128-bit FMACs (fused multiply–accumulate) and one MMX unit (x86 instruction set).
Add to that a HUMA [heterogeneous unified memory architecture] shared memory controller and you can see why AMD would feel confident touting a performance improvement of 20% for the CPU part and 30% for the graphics (compared to Richland).
There are even some performance estimates for the AMD A10-7850K (3.7GHz x86 core clock, 720MHz graphics frequency, 856 GFLOPS).
Finally, AMD's Kaveri mobile APUs will possess AMD Start Now 3.0 technology with smart sleep capability, VCE 2.0 video compression engine, SAMU 2.1 secure asset management, a new UVD 4.2 universal video decode engine, and PCI Express (3.0 x16 for graphics, some lanes for SSDs).
