AMD's next-gen Kaveri chip due in January

Advanced Micro Devices will ship its next-generation Kaveri architecture by January, executives said Monday evening.Specifically, desktop availability will take place on January 14, executives said at AMD’s APU13 conferences on Monday. Chips for notebooks, servers, and embedded systems will follow later in the year, executives said.AMD executives also announced the performance of the Kaveri—856 gigaflops. A diagram displayed by AMD appears to show two “Steamroller” CPU cores and eight Radeon graphics cores. AMD executives did not formerly disclose how fast the chips would run, nor how much they would cost. But a footnote on a presentation slide appears to show the Kaveri’s product name (the AMD A10-7850K) with a note that that figure assumes four 3.7GHz CPU cores, as well as 512 GPUs running at 720MHz.While AMD and its much larger rival Intel are constantly seeking ways to constantly improve the performance of their chips, both companies have begun taking somewhat divergent paths toward the same goal. Both now use multicore approaches, where four, eight, or even more processor cores are laid out in parallel and divvy up the processor tasks.Over time, both companies began also building up the capabilities of their integrated graphics cores, which server vendors have found are also excellent at specialized number crunching. On the desktop, those GPUs can also be used for things like physics calculations to improve the realism of games. Together, the CPU-GPU relationship (also known as an APU) is referred to as heterogenous computing.Earlier this year, AMD formalized its move toward heterogenous computing with what it calls its Heterogenous System Architecture—Kaveri will be the first processor designed specifically with HSA in mind. Specifically, Kaveri will include a next-gen technology called Heterogenous Unified Memory Access (hUMA), a technical name for a shared pool of memory between the GPU and CPU. Normally, handing off results calculated by the CPU to the GPU, and vice versa, can take time. Pooling the memory together, according to AMD, speeds up the process and makes the chip as a whole more efficient.HSA is essentially "functional optimization in silicon," according to Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research, where specific functions get their own optimized cores.Source : PCWorld