AMD Officially Launches The Mobility Kaveri APU Lineup

While Intel announced their Devil’s Canyon processors yesterday, AMD would be launching their mobility Kaveri APU lineup which includes the high-performance AMD FX-7600P and FX-7500 standard voltage accelerated units powering high-end notebooks.

The AMD Kaveri APU architecture on the mobility front is passed over from its desktop sibling based on the 28nm SHP process design making use of the x86 Steamroller core architecture and AMD’s GCN graphics. AMD’s Kaveri APUs feature a 245mm²and a transistor count of 2.41 Billion transistors. The Kaveri APUs enhance the IPC upto 20% over Piledriver while GCN cores deliver increased graphics performance compared to the older VLIW based integrated graphics. Both the CPU and GPU work in harmony through the HSA enhancements which provides a unified coherent memory access to both the CPU and GPU to leverage the performance and ease the process of development for this platform. The Mobile Kaveri APU churns out 818 GFlops of performance which is impressive from a mobility chip.

The Steamroller core architecture is a completely new design with each module featuring two separate threads are provided with their own parallel instruction decoder. AMD’s Steamroller architecture will aim to deliver faster processing power in a clock-to-clock comparison against the Richland APUs and is a step forward.

On the graphics side, we are getting the latest GCN architecture over the VLIW4 featured on previous AMD APUs. The die has upto 8 GCN compute units which feature AMD AudioTrue technology, AMD Eyefinity tech, UVD, VCE, DMA Engine and the addition of coherent shared unified memory. Being based on the same GPU as Hawaii, the Kaveri APU die has 8 ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engine) which can manage 8 Queues and have access to L2 Cache and GDS .

The most significant enhancement Kaveri would adopt is the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) powered with the new HUMA enhancements which allow coherent memory access within the GPU and CPU. HUMA would make sure that both the CPU and GPU would have uniform access to an entire memory space which would be done through the memory controller. HUMA also means an increase in performance on the OpenCL front which has been a plus side for AMD based hardware. This also suggests that faster memory speeds would result in better overall performance from the graphics card.

The Steamroller core architecture is a completely new design with each module featuring two separate threads are provided with their own parallel instruction decoder. AMD’s Steamroller architecture will aim to deliver faster processing power in a clock-to-clock comparison against the Richland APUs and is a step forward.

On the graphics side, we are getting the latest GCN architecture over the VLIW4 featured on previous AMD APUs. The die has upto 8 GCN compute units which feature AMD AudioTrue technology, AMD Eyefinity tech, UVD, VCE, DMA Engine and the addition of coherent shared unified memory. Being based on the same GPU as Hawaii, the Kaveri APU die has 8 ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engine) which can manage 8 Queues and have access to L2 Cache and GDS .

The most significant enhancement Kaveri would adopt is the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) powered with the new HUMA enhancements which allow coherent memory access within the GPU and CPU. HUMA would make sure that both the CPU and GPU would have uniform access to an entire memory space which would be done through the memory controller. HUMA also means an increase in performance on the OpenCL front which has been a plus side for AMD based hardware. This also suggests that faster memory speeds would result in better overall performance from the graphics card.

AMD FX-7600P and FX-7500 – Fourth Generation Mobility APUs

The Kaveri APU can scale down to server platforms, from the high-end desktop PCs all the way to notebooks, servers and embedded applications. The Kaveri APU would come with TDP’s as high as 95W, down to 35W mobility products and 15W in embedded applications. The AMD Mobility Kaveri APU lineup would remain the most basic of these features and would come in several SKUs ranging from the FX, A-Series and Pro A-Series accelerated processing units. Some technologies such as Eyefinity, Dual Graphics, Face Login, Gesture Control, Quick Stream Technology, Wireless Display, Start now, Wireless Display would be readily available on the different models. The initial launch lineup consists of two Mobile Kaveri APUs consists of two products, the FX-7600P and FX-7500.

AMD FX-7600P APU

The flagship Kaveri APU lineup for mobile platforms would be the FX-7600P which is boasting 12 Compute Units that includes 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores. The x86 Steamroller based APU would be clocked at 2.7 GHz stock and 3.6 GHz boost with 4 MB L2 cache while the GCN graphics with 512 stream processors would operate at a frequency of 686 MHz out of box shipping with a TDP of 35W. The APU would support 32 GB of DDR3 memory with speeds of up to 2133 MHz.

AMD FX-7500 APU

The flagship A10 Mobile Kaveri APU includes the A10-7400P which is a 10 Compute Units based model featuring 4 CPU and 6 GPU cores. The The x86 Steamroller based APU would be clocked at 2.1 GHz stock and 3.3 GHz boost with 4 MB L2 cache while the GCN graphics with 384 stream processors would operate at a frequency of 654 MHz out of box shipping with a TDP of 35W. The APU would support 32 GB of DDR3 memory with speeds of up to 2133 MHz.

The fastest Pro model which are aimed at business platforms will include the A10 PRO-7350B which features the same 10 Compute Unit configuration boasting 4 CPU and 6 GPU cores. The The x86 Steamroller based APU would be clocked at 2.1 GHz stock and 3.3 GHz boost with 4 MB L2 cache while the GCN graphics with 384 stream processors would operate at a frequency of 553 MHz out of box shipping with a TDP of 19W. The APU would support 32 GB of DDR3 memory with speeds of up to 1600 MHz. The rest of the lineup could be seen in the chart below:

AMD Mobility Kaveri APU Lineup:

There’s also a possibility that along with the APU launch, AMD and their OEM partners would also introduce the new Crystal Series based notebooks. The new Crystal Series GPU lineup is going to bring some enhancements of the latest GCN 1.1 architecture to the mobile scape unlike the previous rebranded Solar Series. These new GPUs may offer Dual Graphics support with the Kaveri Mobility lineup for added performance. The GPUs include Opal, Topaz, Jet, Amethyst and are listed below:

AMD Crystal Series R5/R7 Series Mobile Graphics:

Codename	Engineering Name	Memory Type
Radeon R7 M265	Opal XT	DDR3
Radeon R7 M260	Opal Pro	DDR3
Radeon R7 M260	Topaz XT	DDR3
Radeon R5 M255	Topaz Pro	DDR3
Radeon R5 M240	Jet XT	DDR3
Radeon R5 M230	Jet Pro	DDR3
Radeon R5 M230	Jet UL/ULT	DDR3

Revolutionary Architecture

Up to 12 Compute Cores (4 CPU + 8 GPU) deliver amazing performance and responsiveness, bringing to life the full capability of the APU on various workloads and applications
The breakthrough new Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) allows the CPU and GPU to work together in harmony by quickly dividing and directing the right tasks toward the appropriate cores for new levels of performance and efficiency in consumer and commercial desktop and notebook PCs, thus enabling a new era of compute capabilities with compute cores
Award-winning Graphics Core Next Architecture with AMD Radeon R7 series graphics and compute capability
Support for UltraHD (4K) resolutions and new video post-processing enhancements that make 1080p videos look amazing when upscaled on an UltraHD-enabled monitor or TV

Best Gaming and Entertainment Experience

Support for AMD’s acclaimed Mantle API that simplifies game optimizations for programmers and developers to unlock unprecedented levels of gaming performance
AMD Radeon Dual Graphics provide a performance boost from 49 percent to 108 percent for the ultimate gaming experience
Experience-enhancing features such as AMD Quick Stream, AMD Steady Video and AMD TrueAudio technologies combine to deliver lifelike audio and video

Performance Leadership

A10-APU: Up to 50 percent better graphics performance6 and more than 1.2x the compute performance7 versus Intel i5-4200U (“Haswell”)
FX APU: Up to 58 percent better graphics performance8 and more than 1.13x the compute performance9 versus Intel i7-4500U (“Haswell”)
FX APU: Up to 40 percent more graphics performance-per-watt10 than our previous generation
FX APU: Up to 30 percent more system compute-per-watt11 than our previous generation