AMD Kaveri confirmed for 2014 release
Chipmaker AMD has confirmed that its next generation Kaveri processor will be publicly available in the first quarter of next year.
The family of Kaveri accelerated processing units (APUs) will combine two to four 28nm CPU cores, based on the Steamroller architecture, with a Graphics Core Next GPU.
It will be the chipmaker's first processor to support its heterogeneous Unified Memory Architecture, which allows both the CPU and GPU to share memory space. Sharing memory space will make it easier for processing tasks to be shared between the CPU and the GPU and play to each processor's strengths. CPUs excel at handling single threaded code with lots of branches while GPUs are suited to parallel processing, especially handling floating point arithmetic.
MD has estimated that the CPUs' Steamroller architecture will boost operations per cycle by 30 per cent over chips based on its Piledriver architecture. The APUs will support both DDR3 and GDDR5 memory
Although earlier AMD product roadmaps that showed a Q4 2013 release date for the Kaveri APU, a spokeswoman for AMD said the company had always intended that the 2013 release date was for resellers and not to the public.
Desktop Kaveri processors based on the FM2+ socket will ship to the public in "early" 2014 and will be available for mobile computers in the first half of 2014.