AMD News: A10-6790K, 13.11 Beta6 Drivers, FM2+ Motherboards, Kaveri
by Jarred Walton on October 28, 2013 2:14 PM EST
AMD held a brief press conference this morning to disclose a new part that should be for sale shortly, the A10-6790K. The performance of the 6790K should be very similar to that of the existing A10-6800K, with the main difference being that the 6790K clocks are 100MHz lower on both the base clock and the turbo clock (4.0-4.3GHz). Pricing is also expected to come in around the $130 mark, making the newcomer $10 less than the existing Richland APU. As you might guess from the part number, this is a fully unlocked Richland APU, and being an unlocked processor, you can always (try to) bump the clocks up 100MHz to make up the difference.
Besides the short update on the new Richland APU, AMD discussed a few other items. AMD mentioned the public availability of their latest beta driver, Catalyst 13.11 Beta6, which was posted last Friday. I’m not sure how much Beta6 changes things relative to the earlier 13.11 betas, but Batman: Arkham Origins gets up to a 35% performance increase; other titles get a more modest 5-10% performance boost (Total War: Rome 2, Battlefield 3, GRID 2, DiRT Showdown, Formula 1 2013, DiRT 3, and Sleeping Dogs). Battlefield 4 likewise got a mention, not surprisingly, as it’s a showcase of AMD’s Mantle API.
Perhaps the most interesting news of all was only touched on briefly. FM2+ motherboards are now shipping, with more likely to show up in the coming weeks. The new platform will support existing Trinity/Richland APUs, but more importantly it will also support the upcoming Kaveri APUs. Kaveri is of course what most of us are looking forward to seeing, and along with the Steamroller architecture update (the current Trinity/Richland are Piledriver architecture), it will be the first high-performance APU to feature an iGPU based on AMD’s GCN architecture. (Kabini has a GCN GPU, but it doesn't play in the same league as Richland, let alone Kaveri.)
We’re expecting a healthy increase in graphics performance with Kaveri, but we don’t know just how fast it will be right now. However, AMD stated that Kaveri will be shipping in 2013 (though perhaps only in small quantities), which means we’ll be able to see just how well Kaveri stacks up against Intel’s latest in the next month or two.
Update: AMD sent along an official statement (which they've issued previously) on Kaveri availability: "AMD's ‘Kaveri’ high-performance APU remains on track and will start shipping to customers in Q4 2013, with first public availability in the desktop component channel very early in Q1 2014. ‘Kaveri’ features up to four ‘Steamroller’ x86 cores, major heterogeneous computing enhancements, and a discrete-level Graphics Core Next (GCN) implementation – AMD’s first high-performance APU to offer GCN. ‘Kaveri’ will be initially offered in the FM2+ package for desktop PCs. Mobile ‘Kaveri’ products will be available later in the first half of 2014." If we read "customers" as the large OEMs that make desktops, then we may or may not have actual Kaveri hardware in hand for testing this year, but we'll wait and see.
Source: AMD Tech Briefing
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Hrel - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
How will these stack up to the FX series CPU's? Cause unless these are at least 30% faster on a per core basis they just don't matter. I mean, think about that, 30% would still be SUBSTANTIALLY slower than Intel. They have to pull that off just to stay relevant.Spunjji - Tuesday, October 29, 2013 - link
They will be slower. Your definition of relevance here is applicable only to a market area that AMD are no longer capable of playing in. The performance of the CPU in these should still be decidedly relevant in the i3 / low end i5 market space.stefstef - Thursday, October 31, 2013 - link
if amd wouldnt have such a weak marketing this could be a success. how can a company offer processors with a sort of sophisticated hyperthreading as having twice the amount of cores thanthey really have. if intel can easily outdo a so called eight core cpu with a product which has only four cpu cores one might draw the conclusion that the so called eight core is some sort of crap. they havent succeeded in marketing their products in another way than performance and were unable to explain why raw performance nowadays isnt the only advantage considering your needs. maybe a good gpu would help them to explain that to their customers. and lets people forget about their approaches with experience and vision labels, which are more confusing than helpful.
mosu - Sunday, November 3, 2013 - link
You're sooo right!RajSB - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Nice to see someone naming their products after Indian (in India) rivers....Kabini now Kaveri. Thanks AMD.tcube - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Some people are really silly around here... richland is ~30% slower in ipc then ivy, 35% slower then haswell if we strip out AVX tests and other intel "dedicated" instructions use. Part of this difference is due to the dear intel compilers which have the infamous "cripple AMD 'instruction'". Richland(the "high end") runs usually 1 ghz over the i5's it's supposed to go against to be able to compete, that's 30% more ghz. If the IPC is improved by 30% and bs like AVX is shipped efficiently to the GPU in store(with HSA) this could just be the end of AMDs dark ages. If all these work out then there won't be an i5 standing and it would probably be on par with intels haswell i7s (albeit with higher power drain and heat thanks to the higher clock & larger node). And remember soon intel will have to decomission & repay any damage done with the biased compilers, so that alone will lift up some "benchmarks" out there. Plus with the advent of HSA AMD might just release some really efficient compilers that are APU aware.Now wether or not AMD will pull this off remains to be seen but with the rumored ipc improvement and all the HSA features this chip might just tip the ballance...