AMD Kaveri Review (Anandtech)

[Liam-McShane]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k

I've only skimmed through the review so far but it appears to be disappointing.

Here are some more reviews for those interested:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2014/01/14/amd-a8-7600-kaveri-review/1 (Bit-tech)

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-A8-7600-Kaveri-APU-Review-HSA-Arrives (PC Per)

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/174632-amd-kaveri-a10-7850k-and-a8-7600-review-was-it-worth-the-wait-for-the-first-true-heterogeneous-chip (Extreme Tech)

[sk8ermanblue]

for the price just get an FX processor and a video card tada better and really not much more money.

[lufihengr]

Basically just a normal generational improvement.

[s3ns3]

i don`t know where are they going with this. a gamer on desktop will use a dedicated gpu. and i`m not talking about the guy who plays solitare.

 

apu would be good on laptops but they are out of the question with that power usage and heat . 

 

180$ is huge for this...this performance. all motherboards have pci-e slot. use it

[qwertywarrior]

the Gpu performance is disappointing but at the price its good i guess

 struggles at 1050p though  

i expected more

 

quite odd there is no bf4 benchmarks

[qwertywarrior]

i don`t know where are they going with this. a gamer on desktop will use a dedicated gpu. and i`m not talking about the guy who plays solitare.

 

apu would be good on laptops but they are out of the question with that power usage and heat . 

 

180$ is huge for this...this performance. all motherboards have pci-e slot. use it

 the idea here is that you could add a GPU (crossfire) to it down the line

[s3ns3]

 the idea here is that you could add a GPU (crossfire) to it down the line

but even then the performance is under hd 7770. but thats not the idea of this

[PortentousLad]

Has anyone actually read the article? It's pretty enlightening as to what AMD is going for. It's not a high end CPU that'll presumably come later, this year *fingers crossed*,

(quote: "

I suspect we'll eventually see an AMD return to the high-end, but that'll come once we're done with the Bulldozer family." - as well as -

"It'll be a while before we see software take advantage of Kaveri's architecture, and it's frustrating that the first HSA APU couldn't have come with a different CPU, but make no mistake: this is a very big deal. The big push on AMD’s side is the development of tools for the major languages (OpenCL, Java, C++ and others) as well as libraries for APIs to do this automatically and with fewer lines of code.

Kaveri is fully OpenCL 2.0 compliant, making it the first CPU/APU/SoC to carry that title." by Ian Cutress & Rahul Garg)

 

seriously just take the 10min and read it thoroughly.

[Sharkyx1]

I was expecting a CPU performance improvement not a degrade, this was incredibly disappointing for me. GPU increase was fine, everything else is about where it should be.

 

I have a 965 BE lying around in a really awful motherboard, i was hoping to replace it with this so i could have USB 3.0 and sata 3, but its just painfully slow in the CPU dpt, thinking i might just grab a cheap AM3 board now.

[Phillyphries]

for the price just get an FX processor and a video card tada better and really not much more money.

tada! You also have to drop $100 - $300 for a GPU

[TechFan@ic]

The CPU performance is very good at 65W and frankly phenomenal at 45W, the new Globalfoundries 28nm SHP process node which AMD is using doesn't scale very well at all with higher TDPs.
So going from 65W to 95W there is only a 400mhz improvement, which mounts to about 12% higher clock speed at roughly 30% higher power.

The GPU performance is good, I don't expect to see Carrizo improve much on the GPU side since we're already hitting a memory bottleneck pretty hard.
The 7850K gains a significant performance boost from 2133mhz memory to 2400mhz.

Also I don't know if it's just me but the Anandtech review did not seem to be on par with what you'd expect, far too many useless synthetics and no overclocking benchmarks.





http://www.pcgameshardware.de/CPU-Hardware-154106/Tests/Kaveri-A10-7850K-Spiele-Tests-Benchmarks-APU-1104954/

[TOMPPIX]

Still waiting for a 6 core apu.

[Phillyphries]

An 8-core APU that runs on 95w or lower would be so amazing in my opinion.

[PortentousLad]

tada! You also have to drop $100 - $300 for a GPU

Exactly. also if you read the PcPer article, AMD's goal I guess is to reduce the need for 8x core CPU since GPU and CPU can work on the same workload without having to wait for the other to finish because of the shared memory. What Kaveri lacks in CPU perf. it more than makes up for on the graphic heavy side, besides this is not just AMD going in this direction remember Haswell has integrated GPU's as well intel is just doing it another way. And once this becomes more developed and more software is taking advantage, which will happen, things are going to become really exciting!

 

("This could potentially have a big impact on applications which can leverage that piece of silicon.  Think of games with lots of AI and physics computations being done on the APU while the graphics card handles only the tessellation, geometry, vertex, and pixel shading.  AI and physics on an APU with shared memory is far more efficient than if running on a standalone card with its own memory.  Things like collision and interaction will be faster and more organic because a program can utilize the same memory space for the CPU and GPU portions of the APU." Kaveri APU Review by PcPer)

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-A8-7600-Kaveri-APU-Review-HSA-Arrives

[Phillyphries]

Exactly. also if you read the PcPer article, AMD's goal is to reduce the need for a strong CPU since GPU and CPU can work on the same workload without having to wait for the other to finish because of the shared mem. What Kaveri lacks in CPU perf. it more than makes up for on the graphic heavy side, besides this is not just AMD going in this direction remember Haswell has integrated GPU's aswell intel is just doing it another way. And once this becomes more developed and more software is taking advantage, which will happen, things are going to be really exciting!

 

("This could potentially have a big impact on applications which can leverage that piece of silicon.  Think of games with lots of AI and physics computations being done on the APU while the graphics card handles only the tessellation, geometry, vertex, and pixel shading.  AI and physics on an APU with shared memory is far more efficient than if running on a standalone card with its own memory.  Things like collision and interaction will be faster and more organic because a program can utilize the same memory space for the CPU and GPU portions of the APU." Kaveri APU Review by PcPer)

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-A8-7600-Kaveri-APU-Review-HSA-Arrives

 

That will truly be amazing. I also hope that this pushes the mATX or ITX form factor even more as well. Things are looking up in terms of innovation this year

[PortentousLad]

Exactly. also if you read the PcPer article, AMD's goal I guess is to reduce the need for 8x core CPU since GPU and CPU can work on the same workload without having to wait for the other to finish because of the shared memory. What Kaveri lacks in CPU perf. it more than makes up for on the graphic heavy side, besides this is not just AMD going in this direction remember Haswell has integrated GPU's as well intel is just doing it another way. And once this becomes more developed and more software is taking advantage, which will happen, things are going to become really exciting!

 

("This could potentially have a big impact on applications which can leverage that piece of silicon.  Think of games with lots of AI and physics computations being done on the APU while the graphics card handles only the tessellation, geometry, vertex, and pixel shading.  AI and physics on an APU with shared memory is far more efficient than if running on a standalone card with its own memory.  Things like collision and interaction will be faster and more organic because a program can utilize the same memory space for the CPU and GPU portions of the APU." Kaveri APU Review by PcPer)

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-A8-7600-Kaveri-APU-Review-HSA-Arrives

ah what do I know. I'm just rambling at this point it's late, I'm sorry will shut up now.

[kuddlesworth9419]

I just wish that APU's die out on the high end. They are unnecessary in every aspect. Any processor from an i5 and up should be being build in a PC that has a dedicated GPU already so there is no need for one, or at least have an i7 option like a 4770k with a few extra cores and no GPU, that was we can please everyone.

[Phillyphries]

I just wish that APU's die out on the high end. They are unnecessary in every aspect. Any processor from an i5 and up should be being build in a PC that has a dedicated GPU already so there is no need for one, or at least have an i7 option like a 4770k with a few extra cores and no GPU, that was we can please everyone.

 

But what would be the point of that (In a gaming sense) if you could get an cheap APU combo with a decent graphics card that can do relatively the same thing? With some optimization, I think buying a high-end system might just be like buying a luxury car in comparison to a money saver.

[kuddlesworth9419]

But what would be the point of that (In a gaming sense) if you could get an cheap APU combo with a decent graphics card that can do relatively the same thing? With some optimization, I think buying a high-end system might just be like buying a luxury car in comparison to a money saver.

But why buy an APU because it's an APU. There is no point in buying an APU if you are going to get a dedicated GPU. So why does intel put GOU cores on it's high end CPU's. Would you not prefer to have 2 extra cores on the 4770k then integrated graphics that you never use. Because I would. If Intel got more cores on it's CPU's I bet we would see more games utilise more cores to.

[Slinkey]

But what would be the point of that (In a gaming sense) if you could get an cheap APU combo with a decent graphics card that can do relatively the same thing? With some optimization, I think buying a high-end system might just be like buying a luxury car in comparison to a money saver.

The standard for most monitors are now 1080p

An APU can barely get 40 FPS on that with everything on max settings.

 

The APU is a bad thing for gamers and that is a fact.

Even on the mobile PCs. they are bad. A dedicated/discreet GPU is always a better option for gamers.

[Phillyphries]

The standard for most monitors are now 1080p

An APU can barely get 40 FPS on that with everything on max settings.

 

The APU is a bad thing for gamers and that is a fact.

Even on the mobile PCs. they are bad. A dedicated/discreet GPU is always a better option for gamers.

 

How is 40 fps bad? That's very playable

 

So is inviting more people to join PC gaming a bad thing too? I don't understand your reasoning. Sure a dedicated card is better, but that's not my point

[s3ns3]

 

But what would be the point of that (In a gaming sense) if you could get an cheap APU combo with a decent graphics card that can do relatively the same thing? With some optimization, I think buying a high-end system might just be like buying a luxury car in comparison to a money saver.

 

How is 40 fps bad? That's very playable

 

So is inviting more people to join PC gaming a bad thing too? I don't understand your reasoning. Sure a dedicated card is better, but that's not my point

 

The POINT is WHY would you buy a cheap(180$ is not that cheap) APU combo with a decent graphics card ? how can that even be? its an apu,you don`t put a decent dedicated gpu next to it because you lose the APU and remain with the CPU. which is an athlon X4 .

you don`t go and buy an APU if you use a dedicated gpu in the first place. its money down the toilet couse you can buy the same cpu found in APU`s unde 100$. so what is your point? 

 

and we should stop saying that APU`s are for gaming,they suck at it. i don`t even mention a hd 7750/hd 7770,  a used gtx 460 + a phenom 2 x4 ,athlon x4 760K,fx 4300 is far better for gaming. even when you CF the apu with a hd 6xxx the performance is under hd 7770.

 

the APU uses PC`s DDR3 memory .thats a huge bottleneck right there thats why you want to get a higher speed ram with them. gaming until this is fixed ?until will have GDDR5 dedicated? no 

 

i see APUs in very small form factor. like tiny. with a motherboard that have no pci-e expansion slot for GPU,couse hey its APU,no ram slot  ,to be similar with what they did with PS4. high speed RAM,dedicated to both system and APU. there is where i see APUs. 

 

what they do here is wrong.the apus you find on desktop is very bad implemented. a laptop would be an ideal place for this thing.but you gotta do something with eficiency first.Atleast intel doesn`t market their integrated gpus for gaming. this is a mistake.

 

if they want to do something with APUs ,they have to do it right. like what they did with PS4. and that would be cheap compact . that would be awesome.not this

[Slinkey]

How is 40 fps bad? That's very playable

 

So is inviting more people to join PC gaming a bad thing too? I don't understand your reasoning. Sure a dedicated card is better, but that's not my point

I just rechecked the benchmarks... they are not even 30 FPS average at 1080p

They are 20 and down

[bob345]

The standard for most monitors are now 1080p

An APU can barely get 40 FPS on that with everything on max settings.

 

The APU is a bad thing for gamers and that is a fact.

Even on the mobile PCs. they are bad. A dedicated/discreet GPU is always a better option for gamers.

so better battery life and and less heat ate not what you want in mobile?. The apu is the best option for a notebook platform. Its the best integrated graphics there is at the moment.

[Katness Everdeen]

The A8 7600 is an insanely good value for 120$ , add an R7 250 in dual graphics for 60$ and you have console killer for 180$.
For that sort of money you would be looking at an i3 and a GT 630 which is going to perform half as well.