First Kaveri desktops due January 14, more details to come at CES

First Kaveri desktops due January 14, more details to come at CES

AMD's next-gen APU is running full steam ahead as the company confirmed we're in for an A-Series start to the new year.

The chipmaker said during the APU13 Developer Summit that its "Kaveri" accelerated processing unit will land in desktops (those with FM2+ socket motherboards), notebooks, embedded systems and servers in 2014.

Following FM2+ motherboard shipments to customers later this year, which Senior Vice President Lisa Su assured is still on track, the first wave in customer desktops are slated for January 14, 2014.

What's more, AMD said more Kaveri details are due at CES 2014. T he Vegas show will serve as "the big coming out party for Kaveri," AMD said during a phone briefing on November 7.

While AMD has yet to confirm, we expect the company will hold a pre-CES press conference on January 6 to lift the lid on more Kaveri details.

What is Kaveri?

Kaveri is AMD's third-gen performance APU and the first with heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) features. It also supports AMD's TrueAudio technology and its Mantle API.

The idea is for Kaveri to boost devices to the "next level of graphics, compute and efficiency." To that end, Kaveri is built on up to four "Steamroller" x86, multi-thread cores. On the graphics end, Kaveri has up to eight Graphics Core Next GPU cores.

According to AMD, Kaveri's HSA features help unlock all of the 856 GFlops found in both the CPU and GPU. The GPU carries more of the workload, and a feature called hUMA turns it into a "first-class citizen" when accessin g memory.

In fact, the GPU is so first class it jams takes up almost 50% of the die and is a 512-core part.

Kaveri performance

Kaveri's heterogeneous queuing also brings parity to the processors, and the GPU and CPU are equally flexible to create and dispatch work. Instead of having to communicate through the operating system, the two units communicate workload through queues.

And Kaveri has another first up its sleeves - AMD claimed it marks the first time a GPU and CPU have uniform visibility into a machine's entire memory space.

While pricing is still unknown, John Taylor, corporate vice president of corporate communication, said the price of a single Kaveri APU will be cheaper than the combined price of an CPU and GPU from competitors.

To show Kaveri's dominance, AMD pitted it against a combo Intel Core i7 4470K CPU and Nvidia GeForce GT630 GPU in a 1080 x 1920 Battlefield 4 demo. Kaveri was clearly more capable running nearly dou ble the frames for second, though it ran its competitive A10 variant.

We're expect to hear more on Kaveri at APU13, so stay tuned for further details.

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