how powerful will the next APU?

[Bateluer]

No one have any news with the 14nm GloFo process status??

They signed a license deal with Samsung to use their 14nm process.

 

[Silverforce11]

Well the PS4 is a 7870 class. So I can't imagine why AMD can't make an APU more powerful than that...

Well I can, it would be too expensive for the APU market. Like Iris Pro is.

 

[Enigmoid]

mantle begs to differ.

Mantle still won't be able to pump playable framerates in a lot of games.

4 kabini cores at 2 ghz with a 280 class gpu is going to bottleneck, mantle or not. Throw an AI or physics intensive game on there and mantle really doesn't matter.

Or there is the fact that mantle, even in the future, won't be part of many games.

 

[Madpacket]

I am waiting for next genegration of kaveri APU,

how powerful will the GPU?

will like R280?

I think we’re at least a few years off from any APU being able to deliver 7970/280 performance. Although possible with today's technology it would be super expensive to try and integrate the components necessary to pull it off.

More than likely we'll be looking at 7750 performance for the next round of high end APU's if DDR4 is supported. I keep hearing about stacked DRAM but I haven't seen it used in any practical way and it'll likely be expensive to implement unless it becomes industry wide so I still think DDR4 has the best chance of improving the fill rate necessary to remove some of the existing bottleneck with APU's.

 

[Silverforce11]

Actually if AMD release a PS4 class APU, and sell it $300, I would buy it. Would make for an awesome HTPC setup, best in in class by far.

 

[monstercameron]

Mantle still won't be able to pump playable framerates in a lot of games.

4 kabini cores at 2 ghz with a 280 class gpu is going to bottleneck, mantle or not. Throw an AI or physics intensive game on there and mantle really doesn't matter.

Or there is the fact that mantle, even in the future, won't be part of many games.

4 kabini cores @2GHz might not be a problem/bottelneck, especially with the examples given. Why? because they can all be gpu accelerated. I doubt that going forward with mantle -if not mantle then dx12 or "zero" overhead OGL- that the cpu will pay as big a role as it does now - for gaming that is.
It is only unfortunate that this isn't already the case - for AMD that is.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

HBM(in-die stacked RAM) can change the game for the APUs someday. Another thing that AMD depends to change is the graphical performance for the size of the graphics processor inside the APU. 512 stream processors is what they can put on the APU per now.

they could put more in now, but as you pointed out, it would be pretty useless to do so when 512 SPs are already bottlenecked by memory bandwidth

Actually if AMD release a PS4 class APU, and sell it $300, I would buy it. Would make for an awesome HTPC setup, best in in class by far.

they could do that, the problem is that it wouldn't have enough bandwidth and would go to waste, the PS4 has quad channel GDDR5, we're stuck with dual channel DDR3. Moving to quad DDR3 would help, but it would still fall far short of GDDR5.

And also the CPU portion isn't good. We'd be better off with them just adding a bigger GPU to their current APU design, but, again, we'd still need the memory bandwidth problem solved

 

[raghu78]

AMD is aggressively pursuing HBM for their GPUs and APUs.

http://www.microarch.org/micro46/files/keynote1.pdf

I would not be surprised to see AMD's R9 300 series and their next gen high end APUs make the transition to HBM next year. HBM provides massive 128 GB/s bandwidth per stack which has 4 DRAM chips stacked on top of another.

APUs - 1 stack - 128 Gb/s
Mid range GPU R9 370 - 2 stacks - 256 Gb/s
High end GPU R9 380 - 3 stacks - 384 Gb/s
Ultra high end R9 390 - 4 stacks - 512 Gb/s

 

[Flapdrol1337]

4 kabini cores @2GHz might not be a problem/bottelneck, especially with the examples given. Why? because they can all be gpu accelerated. I doubt that going forward with mantle -if not mantle then dx12 or "zero" overhead OGL- that the cpu will pay as big a role as it does now - for gaming that is.
It is only unfortunate that this isn't already the case - for AMD that is.

Directx and driver overhead isn't the only thing the cpu is doing. Many games would still be cpu limited at low fps without even doing any rendering.
Like in most games with lots of ai units everything is handled sequentially so you can have synchronised multiplayer while only communicating player input.

I'd love to see a 290x with lots of memory and a cpu socket though. Or will the latency be too great for that to work?

 

[SPBHM]

Actually if AMD release a PS4 class APU, and sell it $300, I would buy it. Would make for an awesome HTPC setup, best in in class by far.

AMD would be forced to sell a motherboard with soldered APU and memory to achieve this, and no less than 8GB 256bit GDDR5 (impossible to upgrade), I think $300 is to low for that.

considering it's something like a R9 270 with 4x the memory + CPU cores + "chipset".

also 8 1.6GHz Jaguar Cores are not a good choice for PCs, they would have to use a difference core for that APU, like the cores used in Kaveri, and you have to wonder about TSMC vs GloFo,

 

[Erenhardt]

AMD have had 200W CPUs already. They could go for 200W APUs aswell.

Pirate Islands are rumored to bring efficiency gains. Add process node shrink to that and 280X may become 150W. HBM is going to lower power usage aswell.
One thing they need is improved CPU cores so that four of those can match at least fx6300.

And soon your mainstream gaming PC will be an 200 Watt APU driven, liquid cooled, small itx box without dedicated graphics card. dGPUs will be an enthusiast's thing.

 

[monstercameron]

people make out the jaguar cores to be slouches, they aren't haswell fast but they can more than get the job for gaming.

So far we haven't heard much if any of the devs fuss about the xbox1 or ps4 cpu limitation, I don't know if I should call it evidence or a coincidence.

http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/04...am-cpu-and-gpu-compute-to-make-our-jaws-drop/
more gpu cores and more gpgpu...FUSION IS THE FUTURE!
[confirmation bias and subtle trolling]

 

[ShintaiDK]

So far we haven't heard much if any of the devs fuss about the xbox1 or ps4 cpu limitation, I don't know if I should call it evidence or a coincidence.

Oh we did. Devs have complained about it. MS even boosted the clock on the cores. Not to mention the many consoles games that are limited to 30 FPS and so on with reduced featuresets. And some devs like DICE already says the nextgen consoles are loaded up to 95% on the CPU already.

Kabini cores are anything but fast.

 

[monstercameron]

Oh we did. Devs have complained about it. MS even boosted the clock on the cores. Not to mention the many consoles games that are limited to 30 FPS and so on with reduced featuresets. And some devs like DICE already says the nextgen consoles are loaded up to 95% on the CPU already.

Kabini cores are anything but fast.

links breh, where are they at?

I saw the 95% sentiment from dice[that wasnt complaining but bragging] and the framerate issues have little to do with the cpu.

Again I am not saying puma is fast just that it will more than get the job done for gaming.

 

[ShintaiDK]

links breh, where are they at?

I saw the 95% sentiment from dice[that wasnt complaining but bragging] and the framerate issues have little to do with the cpu.

Again I am not saying puma is fast just that it will more than get the job done for gaming.

http://gamingbolt.com/project-cars-...splitting-renderer-across-threads-challenging
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-23-why-need-for-speed-rivals-runs-at-30-frames-per-second

And FPS issues are certainly CPU related too. The GPU isnt the only limiting factor.

You overestimate the abilities for the small cores greatly. Just try a Kabini yourself with a highend GPU and run some of the mantle games. Then let me know what games you even pass 30 FPS ingame on. Note, I am not talking about prescripted benchmarks. And consoles are notoriously know to be heavily feature reduced.

ESO is another game that got postponed 6 months for consoles, due to needing much much more optimization to even run somewhat acceptable.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

I think the planetside 2 devs were most vocal in their complaining about the lack of cpu power.

 

[Erenhardt]

http://gamingbolt.com/project-cars-...splitting-renderer-across-threads-challenging
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-08-23-why-need-for-speed-rivals-runs-at-30-frames-per-second

And FPS issues are certainly CPU related too. The GPU isnt the only limiting factor.

You overestimate the abilities for the small cores greatly. Just try a Kabini yourself with a highend GPU and run some of the mantle games. Then let me know what games you even pass 30 FPS ingame on. Note, I am not talking about prescripted benchmarks. And consoles are notoriously know to be heavily feature reduced.

ESO is another game that got postponed 6 months for consoles, due to needing much much more optimization to even run somewhat acceptable.

nfs runs at 30 due to physics design - you can unlock it on PC and have skyrim-like effects .

Project cars dev sounds like he wants mantle badly
Showing incompetence to a public can scare off investors - not the smartest idea. Also, how is ps4 single threaded cpu performance worst than high-end pc? Is there any significant difference between high-end i7 and low end pentium in single threaded performance?

But I see where your going with it and I 100% agree. DX11 is bad and the industry needs mantle-like standard api

I think the planetside 2 devs were most vocal in their complaining about the lack of cpu power.

Yea, their game was running on a single core before they started optimizing for ps4. Not a single person could play it comfortably then.

 

[Blitzvogel]

nfs runs at 30 due to physics design - you can unlock it on PC and have skyrim-like effects .

Project cars dev sounds like he wants mantle badly
Showing incompetence to a public can scare off investors - not the smartest idea. Also, how is ps4 single threaded cpu performance worst than high-end pc? Is there any significant difference between high-end i7 and low end pentium in single threaded performance?

But I see where your going with it and I 100% agree. DX11 is bad and the industry needs mantle-like standard api


Yea, their game was running on a single core before they started optimizing for ps4. Not a single person could play it comfortably then.

Single Jaguar core = 1.6 GHz, 128 bit SIMD, relatively narrow core, etc

Modern desktop PC core/module = 3.0+ GHz, 256 bit SIMD, relatively wider core, etc

An old Phenom II x4 is likely just as fast. Kaveri or an i3 certainly is.