AMD A10-7850K And A8-7600: Kaveri Gives Us A Taste Of HSA

We've spent the days following CES benchmarking two of AMD's new Kaveri-based APUs. Do the Steamroller x86 architecture, GCN graphics design, and HSA-oriented features impress, or do they come up short against Intel's value-oriented Haswell-based parts?

This year’s CES was my most insane to date. I showed up in Vegas two days earlier, stayed a day later, and managed to fit close to 50 different meetings into a schedule that started early in the morning and didn’t end until late at night. But by the end, I had a solid grasp on the technologies we’ll be seeing in 2014. Some of them are decidedly evolutionary. Others, like Oculus’ Crystal Cove prototype, will fundamentally change PC gaming for the better.

For AMD’s part, it spent CES talking about Kaveri—a design that, on paper, should be interesting stuff for enthusiasts. There are the Steamroller-based x86 cores, giving us a new processor architecture to talk about. This is also the first time AMD’s vaunted Graphics Core Next design finds its way into an APU. The company did a ton of work enabling Heterogeneous System Architecture features for better interplay between computing resources and software developers. And it’s using a new 28 nm manufacturing process from GlobalFoundries.

But although this week's introduction focused on the top-end 95 W A10-7850K, the real emphasis of Kaveri is down in the lower-power segments. Company representatives say engineers designed for the 35 to 45 W range, scaling as high as 95 and as low as 15 W. AMD wants to see APUs in desktops, notebooks, embedded environments, and servers. So, it took the middle road in order to better optimize for those targets. AMD also had to make some compromises on the manufacturing side, better balancing transistor density to enable a 512-shader Radeon graphics core, while ultimately sacrificing CPU speed.