AMD Introduces Kaveri APUs for Laptops

AMD has seized the opportunity of Computex to officially introduce its Kaveri apus for laptops. The first reviews of the chips have also come online. The FX and A-apus seem to deliver on the promise of better performance with lower consumption.

AMD actually introduced Kaveri at the beginning of this year, but then it was only about desktop processors. After the company accidentally put all the specifications of the versions for laptops online earlier, the Kaveri platform for laptops was officially introduced on Wednesday. It is the first major architecture change of AMD mobile APUs for the major laptop market in two years: Richland was an upgrade from Trinity from 2012 last year.

Among other things, the CPU cores have been improved in Kaveri. They consist of Steamroller modules, as we wrote in the review about the desktop variants, which should ensure better cache usage, better industry prediction and more effective scheduling. The strong point of AMD’s APUs is traditionally the GPU and these have also been updated to the new R-generation of the graphics core next-cores. AMD also uses the term ‘Compute Core’ for the GPU, which must indicate a ‘computing core’ that must be able to independently take care of a complete computing process. A Kaveri apu has a maximum of eight GPU cores, so a total of 512 stream processors, where Richland had a maximum of 384 stream processors.

Like Trinity and Richland, Kaveri is built around the heterogeneous system architecture, with which AMD indicates the architecture that should give the gpu an equal role in relation to the cpu. In addition, the heterogeneous unified memory architecture and heterogeneous queuing have been added, in which the principle has been extended to respectively being able to access memory and the direct transfer of workloads from the cpu to the gpu, without the intervention of drivers.

There are three APUs with 35W TDP, five chips with 19W TDP and two variants with 17W. Anandtech subjected the most powerful APU, the FX-7600P, to a test and came to the conclusion that the performance is promising, but that it is mainly the performance of the economical variants that will determine the success. The question is how the battery life of laptops with those chips will be and whether enough manufacturers are prepared to include the APUs in laptops. Given the tendency of manufacturers to cut costs as much as possible on laptops these days, AMD seems to have an opportunity here.