Monday, December 30th 2013
AMD A10 "Kaveri" APU Pictured, Battlefield 4 Bundles Planned
What better way to market the graphics processing prowess of your processor than bundling one of the most GPU-intensive games of the season with it? AMD is reportedly planning "Battlefield 4 Edition" packages of its A10 "Kaveri" APUs, which at slightly higher premiums than normal PIB packages, would give you Origin keys to Battlefield 4, much like a similar scheme with AMD's Radeon R9 290 series.
Such Battlefield 4 SKUs could involve at least two APU models, the A10-7850K, and A10-7700K. The two may meet the minimum system requirements of the game at resolutions of up to HD+ (1600 x 900 pixels). Speaking of A10-7850K, Japanese publication "Hermitage Akihabara" snapped a handful pictures and screenshots of the the chip. The first one below reveals the APU package, the following reveal the CPU-Z and GPU-Z screenshots, trailed by a quick run of Cinebench R15. AMD is expected to launch its "Kaveri" line of socket FM2+ APUs on January 13-14 globally.
Source:
Hermitage Akihabara
Such Battlefield 4 SKUs could involve at least two APU models, the A10-7850K, and A10-7700K. The two may meet the minimum system requirements of the game at resolutions of up to HD+ (1600 x 900 pixels). Speaking of A10-7850K, Japanese publication "Hermitage Akihabara" snapped a handful pictures and screenshots of the the chip. The first one below reveals the APU package, the following reveal the CPU-Z and GPU-Z screenshots, trailed by a quick run of Cinebench R15. AMD is expected to launch its "Kaveri" line of socket FM2+ APUs on January 13-14 globally.
45 Comments on AMD A10 "Kaveri" APU Pictured, Battlefield 4 Bundles Planned
Why they'd supply BF4 with this I don't know.
Course remember those run with pretty weak CPU cores.
I'm not saying that the new Kaveri APUs that are going to come out aren't sufficient for the majority of people, I'm just saying that it isn't sufficient for the enthusiast (for heavy dx11-based games like BF4).
Read the last few posts here. AMD continuously delays these big announcements with good reason, either they haven't gotten Mantle up to snuff yet, or they have ran into more problems than they can solve. In either case, I'm not holding my breath and I suggest no one else does either. If Mantle delivers what is promised, then I would think it would hurt AMD graphics sales just a little on the high-end segments. Think about it, if Mantle can give me a 300-400% increase in FPS, then why pay AMD $500+ to get a R9 290 when I can just get a simple 270 or 270X and save myself a good chunk?
Don't get me wrong, I like AMD's products, it's just that they suck on deliverance.
Bottom line: I'll believe it when I see it.
And what Dice and Oxide tried to tell you is that Mantle gives them the level of access to the hardware as they have on console.
AMD doesn't have many reasons or resources to invest in high-end APUs at the moment, but other than that, APUs, the concept itself, means a paradigm shift in CPU computing, hence one on any consumer level. I guess people find it hard to understand the concept of booting up their OS on the GPU... or calculating their spreedsheets... or layers of images... or movie rendering...
The point is that APUs are designed with simplicity in mind. Simplicity mixed with a bit of power, enough to do most tasks and then some (light gaming). Yes it addresses the paradigm shift in CPU computing, but it doesn't mean that there's going to be a high-end APU capable of playing BF4 w/ all settings maxed and high resolution, at least not anytime soon. Every product has it's place. If you convince yourself otherwise, then your just lying to yourself.
Why didn't anybody tell me!?!
APUs are not for high end PCs. Low and mid range, and they are doing a good job of it too.
There's no way AMD could have dropped the ball this badly. Sure, Bulldozer was a disappointment, but that was a completely new architecture with growing pains. This is a third-generation part; if it can't even keep up with the previous generation then why would they even bother?
That being said, even my 6800K can play BF4 at 720p, which is damn good for integrated graphics. Look closely, he has the benchmark set to show single core performance. The fact that a single Kaveri core at 3.7GHz is scoring right about half of a single Haswell core at 4.4GHz is a pretty decent improvement. Not really, Richland in single threaded performance was way behind IvyBridge. Intel's single threaded performance is huge compared to AMD's, which makes since considering Intel designs one core to do the work of two. So when that core is one core is only challenged with one work load it is super fast.