AMD has announced that its next generation of chips, Kaveri, will be available for dekstops as soon as January 14 next year, with notebooks, servers and embedded systems coming soon after. This announcement colors the PC wars further, which continues to go on discreetly parallel to the console wars.
In this case, AMD is not just competing for GPUs with Nvidia, but its only real competition in the CPU space, Intel. Their APU architecture combines both CPU and GPU in a single chip. AMD claims that this solution provides better performance, lower power consumption, and ease of development.
Kaveri is the 3rd generation of APUs, said to be using the 1st Steamroller CPU core, as well as a Graphics Core Next GPU and an on-chip ARM Cortex-A5 MPCore. AMD is just as aggressive in promoting Kaveri as Nvidia is with the Titan as the ultimate gaming setup. Many speculate it is to AMD’s benefit that they supplied the chips for and helped develop all the 8th generation consoles, the Wii U, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
In their APU13 conference yesterday, AMD announced two metrics that drew the press’ attention: 512 GPUs, running at 720 MHz, and an apparent 856 GFLOPs. They are otherwise tightlipped on exact specs, but demonstrate apparent superiority of the new chip playing Battlefield 4, compared to a Haswell i7-4770K paired with a GeForce 630. While the Intel/Nvidia setup could barely get up to 15 FPS, Kaveri managed to run between 28-40 FPS. Obviously, this is a midrange setup, touting an affordable power solution over an absolutely powerful, and expensive, setup.
Real tech geeks will want to get the full spec details from the source below. For the rest of us, it’s enough to know that AMD is upgrading their chips as well as Nvidia, so now might really be a good time to upgrade your PC. Image below is from the AMD presentation illustrating HuMA for the new APU.
