

AMD Kaveri Review - amartya916
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k

======
elipsey
From the looks of AMD, Moore's law hasn't just ended it's reversed: CPUs are
getting worse every year.

I bought a Thuban Phenom II X4 and an hd5750 about five years ago. If I had
known then that AMD would refuse ever again to sell me a CPU with IPC that
good, I would have sprung for an X6. In other words AMD can't compete with
it's own 5 year old products. An 1100T now sells for more on ebay than a new
Vishera; apparently the market has decided that it's more valuable.

Anand's reviewers (Cutress and Garg) almost admit as much, saying "Kaveri is
just another iteration of AMD’s APU line up that focuses purely on the
integrated graphics side of things, while slowly improving the CPU side back
to Thuban levels of performance."

It seems like Kaveri, and AMDs previous APUs in general, are perversely
configured so that they don't make sense for any usage case.

\--The marketing pushes desktop gaming, but it's worse than most low end GPUs
(and old GPUs too).

\--It's not an upgrade to my five year old desktop CPU. It's probably worse at
lightly threaded performance then similarly priced intel products which are,
curiously, not included in this review...

\--Apparently most mobile Kaveri will have a 35 watt TDP. If it's turns out
like mobile Richland, you'll be lucky to find one anyway. There are 1597
laptops on newegg right now, 9 have high end A10s, and they are all huge.

If they die shrunk Thuban, I would buy it. If they put more cores on Kaveri, I
would buy that. If someone would put an A10 in a laptop that wasn't a huge,
cheap, POS, I might even buy that. But so far they won't.

So who is this for?

Mobile might be appealing if we care more about gaming than work or battery
life, but at this point it's not clear how available it will be. As a
programmer, I like the idea of unified memory but that's not a selling point
for customers. A friend of mine has a laptop with a recent APU, and she just
figured out that it's too slow for minecraft. Telling her about hUMA did not
make the sad face go away, true story.

The only place APUs looks good is for desktop gamers who don't have a desktop
already, and can't afford better, even by a few measly bucks. I'm not even
sure that they wouldn't be better off with a Haswell Pentium and and $50 GPU
for the same price, but Anandtech won't tell us...

Did no one else notice that Anandtech's review is posted in the site's "AMD
Center", and is "presented by AMD"? I call shenanigans. And people in this
thread are calling Anandtech one of the best hardware sites on the the net...
Now I'm depressed.

~~~
kayoone
i hear you..i still own a phenom X4 3.4Ghz and will just purchase a $150 GPU
to replace the old HD5000 series and it will be much much faster than any of
those APUs for the same price.

------
georgeecollins
This was a lot to read so I tried to find a quote that boiled it down:

"The reality is quite clear by now: AMD isn't going to solve its CPU
performance issues with anything from the Bulldozer family. What we need is a
replacement architecture, one that I suspect we'll get after Excavator
concludes the line in 2015. "

And from the last paragraph I took that it would be a good CPU for a budget
gaming box.

~~~
caf
I disagree - I think the money quote is this one:

    
    
      One of the prominent features of Kaveri we will be
      looking into is its HSA (Heterogenous System 
      Architecture) – the tight coupling of CPU and GPU, 
      extending all the way down to the programming model. Gone
      are the days when CPU and GPU cores have to be treated
      like independent inequals, with tons of data copies back
      and forth for both types of cores to cooperate on the
      same problem. With Kaveri, both CPU and GPU are treated
      as equal class citizens, capable of working on the same
      data in the same place in memory. It'll be a while before
      we see software take advantage of Kaveri's architecture,
      and it's frustrating that the first HSA APU couldn't have
      come with a different CPU, but make no mistake: this is a
      very big deal.
    

It's not a reason to buy one for a gaming box today, but the article is right:
this architectural change is a very big deal.

~~~
chinpokomon
Stream Box architecture?

------
kayoone
Love Anandtech, clutter free straight to the point review with the stuff that
matters.

Boils down to: Kaveri itself is a nice evolution from the previous APUs and
offers healthy performance gains and the lower end model matches performance
of previous top APUs at lower power consumption. CPU performance is largely
unchanged and they wont be able to challenge Intel with the Bulldozer
architecture which will be around until 2015. Its a very nice APU for Desktops
that need some gaming/gpu chops, but nothing revolutionary as the Intel CPUs
with integrated Iris Pro are in the same league when it comes to GPU
performance and even outperform the Kaveri in many benchmarks.

HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) has a lot of potential and could be a
model for the future, if that works out with the market adopting remains to be
seen though.

~~~
sireat
Good review as usual by Anand.

However, it is sort of silly to compare the extremely expensive $400+ (they
are expensive to make too) Iris Pro CPUs with Kaveri.

It is much more reasonable to compare CPU and GPU performance to mainstream
chips like i5-4570 which have 4600 graphics.

~~~
kayoone
yes taking price into account thats true. But one could make the argument that
even a $50 discrete GPU will be much faster.

Just wanted to give the perspective that, while the performance is pretty
good, its not the fastest on-die gpu.

------
ScottWhigham
I got a bit confused when he compared the Kaveri to the Intel. Not one of the
charts had the Intel CPU even showing up. And at the end, the graphic compares
the Kaveri A10-7860 to the i5-4670K whereas the charts were using the
i7-4770R.

~~~
sliverstorm
They were confusing charts, not what you are used to seeing. The charts were
normalized to the Intel chip; thus a positive bar for an AMD chip in that
graph means relative improvement to the Intel chip, and a negative bar
relative loss to the Intel chip.

Confusing, and of course the meanings reverse with "lower-is-better" graphs.

The way I usually see to show normalized performance is normalizing to 100
rather than 0. An example, normalizing on the A10-6700:

[http://media.bestofmicro.com/M/1/387001/original/Average-
per...](http://media.bestofmicro.com/M/1/387001/original/Average-perf.png)

------
zokier
I found the review itself quite disappointing. Where are power consumption
measurements? Where are comparable discrete-gpu+cpu comparisons? Dual-gpu
results?

~~~
keypusher
If you care enough to know what a discrete gpu is, this is probably not the
CPU for you. While this might be the best integrated GPU to come around yet,
it's not going to offer the performance of a good discrete card.

------
pella
similar:

"AMD launches Kaveri processors aimed at starting a computing revolution
(venturebeat.com)"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057733)

~~~
kayoone
This is an in-depth technical review from one of the best hardware sites while
that venturebeat article is just a blown up AMD press release.

