AMD Launches The A10-7800, The 65 Watt Kaveri

[mmstick]

the real reason is three words: Intel Viral Marketing. They basically pay off Anandtech, Tom's hardware and a few other key sites to manipulate the enthusiast market which then trickles down into the more general public as the unwashed masses go ask their resident enthusiast what computer they should buy.

If you look at this benchmarks this is basically born out. For a game run under real world settings you gain at most a few frames per second, and they're primarily GPU bound. Sure if you turn the settings all the way down to get absurd FPS there might be a much bigger gap but pray tell who does that in practice? The only real exceptions are poorly written games like Skyrim, and things like RTSes, but in the later case there's a lot more to be gained by going parallel as opposed to throwing more power at any particular thread.

It's actually caused by Intel making contracts with OEMs, both on mobile, laptop, and desktop to corner the market. You'll always find significantly less offerings with AMD processors in them, and the laptops are a good example of the preferential treatment given to Intel (try finding AMD laptops with 1080p displays, let alone AMD laptops carrying the latest APUs). In mobile Intel is just giving out their processors for practically nothing so everyone will sell products with Intel rather than picking one of those new mobile APUs.

Skyrim actually runs really well on AMD processors. It didn't originally because the game was compiled with the Intel C++ compiler. I've never have any problem with big RTS games like Shogun 2 with AMD either.

[Luke_Wolf]

Skyrim actually runs really well on AMD processors. It didn't originally because the game was compiled with the Intel C++ compiler. I've never have any problem with big RTS games like Shogun 2 with AMD either.

Ah, it's been quite a while but I had assumed Skyrim was still having issues based upon the last benchmarks I'd seen for it. Hadn't heard about them switching.

Also I wasn't implying that AMD performed poorly with RTSes. The point I was getting at was that RTSes are basically the only game type that is CPU bound (with there being a few games that don't adhere to this rule) as opposed to the more normal GPU bounding, but that once more it's a situation that would benefit from going parallel more than having a serial pipeline go faster.

[xeizo]

No they don't, they need exactly what they're building, APUs for HSA, take note of the list of companies collaborating with them, most of them are ARM SoC builders for a reason, HSA is going to help a ton on consumer grade systems, especially since it looks like the libraries they are building will get you GPGPU capability for your existing software without having to write specifically for OpenCL.

The keywords are "going to", as of yet there is no popular application that benefits from the above. When those applications arrive, then it will become intreresting, but not until then ...

[blackiwid]

I heard nothing about hsa helping in gaming, yes, for heavy office users which needs every bit more speed on office work and a kabini or something like that is to less, kaveri is great.

But so far I've seen noving pointing that hsa will make the cpu better for gaming.

And u say that always games are gpu bottleneckt, thats just not true, would that be true there would be no point in mantle.

Yes its maybe somethimes bad programmed games, but they exist, u cant just ignore them, I even would go so far taht 90% of all games are developed bad in terms of performance, again if taht would not be the case we would not see this huge numbers with mantle.

Of course a fx8xxx is fast enough for most games or better to say for most grafic cards, with all AA settings. or with 4k and similar stuff. but kaveri only has 4 cpu cores. instead of 8. I just replaced my fx4100 with a f6300, ok I would not absolutly need to, but a hd 7950 get even bottleneckt by the fx6300 in some cases and would be bottlenecked with a fx4100 pretty hard. The kaveri is somewhere between this 2 cpus speedwise.

And u can say then buy a fx8xxx its cheaper than intel, that depends how much u use it, u have 100Watt more power consumption under gaming load, if u play 6 hours a day thats 45 euro per year. a new core i5 which is faster in games cost around 150 euro new, this new kaveri costs maybe 10 euro less.

So that makes no big sense, fx6300 for me is a good mixture, because I cant afford a faster grafics card than the hd5950 powerwise, because I use a 380W power supply and a small yatx case, and for this the fx6300 fits well and I had a am3+ board anyway.

But with a bigger pc and a R9 290(x) this cpu and the kaveri would be not enough. And even without that grafic card there are games where this cpu gives u not so good results, as example planetside 2 especialy if u dont overclock.

[Kivada]

The keywords are "going to", as of yet there is no popular application that benefits from the above. When those applications arrive, then it will become intreresting, but not until then ...

The code is already showing up...

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?103361-AMD-Publishes-Open-Source-Linux-HSA-Kernel-Driver

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/amd-demos-hsa-for-the-server-room-with-java-on-top/

[Kivada]

I heard nothing about hsa helping in gaming, yes, for heavy office users which needs every bit more speed on office work and a kabini or something like that is to less, kaveri is great.

But so far I've seen noving pointing that hsa will make the cpu better for gaming.

I would expect that there would be more stuff like PhysX, but much more capable for your gaming where you'd be able to use the GPU side of the APU as a physics co-processor while your HD 290X is what's actually pushing frames to your monitor.

Mantle it a means to use even lower powered CPUs with more powerful GPUs with no performance hit.

[cutterjohn]

Yep i considered these APUs for somebody looking at the watts/price with no additional card and no overclocking . Products are fine in that regard, and i am actually only interested to see how much CPU/GPU performance difference is between 95W K CPUs and these new non K optimized for lower power suckage .

Lets go Michael benchmark A10-7850K 95W vs A10-7800 65W and in 45W mode too

I only bought one to potentially tinker around with HSA someday maybe, of course by the time it really gets support(if ever, it probably will... but...) there'll be newer models hopefully with better CPU cores(*wink* *wink* *nod* *nod* they're supposed to be working on this now for real *wink* *wink*) and more integration of CPU/GPU...

Thing's it'd be good for HTPCs too, as well as super el cheapo notebooks with decent v. intel IGP gfx perf... beyond that they're looking for a market unless they can push more gpgpu use along, in which case it should be quite capable v. again the case of lower end intel + IGP assuming that any HSA/gpgpu must account for discrete cpu/non-tightly coupled GPUs for quite sometime or fall into a niche...

[curaga]

The keywords are "going to", as of yet there is no popular application that benefits from the above. When those applications arrive, then it will become intreresting, but not until then ...

Do you not count LibreOffice and JPEG as popular?

[Adarion]

Does any JPEG lib already use HSA? I saw on libjpeg-turbo's website that AMD sponsored some OpenCL work. I mean, it would be quite nice if some generic system lib that all sorts of programs use would make use of all this possible acceleration. So the user software doesn't have to care about anything and the libjpeg-turbo + recent kernel with HSA driver do all the work.

[dungeon]

Does any JPEG lib already use HSA?

Not sure if HSA specific code is needed at all there . but that only if code is written for OpenCL 2.0 (and not for the earlier versions) because only 2.0+ seems to be HSA compatible .

So if you run OpenCL 2.0+ code it will take speedness from HSA hardware automatically - but i am also not sure in this claim, that is just guessing how i think that will goes .