AMD has announced that two of its A-series “Kaveri” chips are now available for preorder, and will be in the shops on January 14.
Inside the new A10-7700K and A10-7850K are 4 CPU cores and 8 Radeon R7 GPU cores. Now, however, AMD is simply referring to both as “compute cores,” and failing to distinguish between the two. Both chips contain 12 “compute cores”.
At the CES show at Las Vegas AMD also announced three new mobile GPUs for notebooks, including the R9 290 GTX. and the R5 M230.
The chipmaker also talked about its the Discovery Project, a sleeve that designed to plug into and enhance AMD-based tablets, and an envelope-sized PC prototype that uses one of AMD’s next-generation ultrabook chip, code-named “Mullins.”
What appears to be happening is that the lines between CPUs and GPUs are blurring, as specialised tasks once performed by high-end microprocessors are being passed over to more specialised GPUs serving as coprocessors.
Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager, global business units, told an audience at the AMD press conference that the number of APUs is expected to grow to 160 million units by 2015, doubling in the last two years.
She said that Kaveri is the best and most powerful APU that AMD has ever put out there,” Su said. She ran a brief clip of what of Tomb Raider, running on Kaveri to prove it.
Kaveri is the first AMD processor to support HAS and Su also announced some aggressive benchmarks in a bid to stick two fingers up at Chipzilla which was also having a bit announcement.
The new chips should offer a total compute power of 856 gigaflops which is fairly floppy. Both chips will have support for AMD’s TrueAudio technology, Graphics Core Next architecture with AMD’s Mantle technology, and will be powered by AMD’s Steamroller processor architecture.
Source: TechEye
