Kaveri APU and DDR4

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Serrix

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 12, 2013
Messages
137
With Kaveri coming out next year, along with DDR4 RAM (Maybe even before that), it will be nice to see that these AMD APUs will be backing some power behind them. Being shrunk down to 28NM will also show a nice change.
The main interest though will be the graphics running off of the DDR4 RAM.
What kind of power should we expect to see from future integrated graphics?
 
I'm not quite sure, I haven't looked too far in to Kaveri, so I'm sorry if I'm wrong about the DDR4 and have a lack of knowledge on this subject, but with the assumption that DDR4 is coming out, they should take advantage of it.
 
tonyftw said:
Yeah, this is what I remember as well.
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It feels like AMD is late to the party on some things. (Although I am too on this subject)
As they know that RAM is essential to the graphics of an APU, why would they not use the upcoming DDR4 that would give an advantage over DDR3?
Another question though is how is the upcoming PS4 using GDDR5 RAM and how is the APU going to take advantage of it if even Kaveri can't use DDR4?
 
Serrix said:
It feels like AMD is late to the party on some things. (Although I am too on this subject)
As they know that RAM is essential to the graphics of an APU, why would they not use the upcoming DDR4 that would give an advantage over DDR3?
Another question though is how is the upcoming PS4 using GDDR5 RAM and how is the APU going to take advantage of it if even Kaveri can't use DDR4?
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They're different parts entirely, especially on the CPU side of the equation.
 
Serrix said:
Oh okay.
How different are we talking exactly?
Jaguar is something else...
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Well, compared to the Kaveri APU, the PS4 APU SoC has the following:
  • much SMALLER two Jaguar modules (4 cores per module), 8 cores total
  • 4MB of L2 cache (2MB per module)
  • a LARGER, customized Radeon 7000-series GPU (somewhere between a Radeon HD 7850 and a 7870)
  • GDDR5 memory controller
  • integrated chipset features-- SATA3 controller, USB 3.0 controller, and other features
  • no PCI-E controller
For the Kaveri APU, we'll probably be looking at the following:
  • much LARGER two Steamroller modules (2 cores per module), 4 cores total
  • a much SMALLER Radeon HD 8000-series GPU
  • 2MB of L2 shared cache per module (?) for 4MB total
  • No L3 cache
  • Dual channel DDR3 controller with up to 2166MHz or possibly higher supported speeds.
  • No integrated chipset features
  • PCI-E 3.0 x16 (two x8 per slot?)
  • No HyperTransport like in Trinity and Richland APUs
If there's anything else I'm missing, feel free to list it. Since DDR4 is not planned to be released until mid- to late-2014 for servers and 2015 for consumers, I DO NOT expect DDR4 support in Kaveri APUs OR Steamroller FX anytime soon. I expect them to be in Excavator-based APUs and FX processors sometime in 2015 or 2016 whenever it is released along with a new socket not related to AM3+.
 
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octoberasian said:
Well, compared to the Kaveri APU, the PS4 APU SoC has the following:
  • much SMALLER two Jaguar modules (4 cores per module), 8 cores total
  • 4MB of L2 cache (2MB per module)
  • a LARGER, customized Radeon 7000-series GPU (somewhere between a Radeon HD 7850 and a 7870)
  • GDDR5 memory controller
  • integrated chipset features-- SATA3 controller, USB 3.0 controller, and other features
  • no PCI-E controller
For the Kaveri APU, we'll probably be looking at the following:
  • much LARGER two Steamroller modules (2 cores per module), 4 cores total
  • a much SMALLER Radeon HD 8000-series GPU
  • 2MB of L2 shared cache per module (?) for 4MB total
  • No L3 cache
  • Dual channel DDR3 controller with up to 2166MHz or possibly higher supported speeds.
  • No integrated chipset features
  • PCI-E 3.0 x16 (two x8 per slot?)
  • No HyperTransport like in Trinity and Richland APUs
If there's anything else I'm missing, feel free to list it. Since DDR4 is not planned to be released until mid- to late-2014 for servers and 2015 for consumers, I DO NOT expect DDR4 support in Kaveri APUs OR Steamroller FX anytime soon. I expect them to be in Excavator-based APUs and FX processors sometime in 2015 or 2016 whenever it is released along with a new socket not related to AM3+.
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very appreciated for the compare and contrast, gives some clarity
 
kirbyrj said:
All depends on the driver support and how games are optimized for it. I don't think it would be anything special in a PC.
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I find APUs to be quite a big thing in CPU/GPU engineering, its quite amazing actually. Maybe its just me.
 
^It is quite a big thing, really. HSA will advance the industry a lot more than just small incremental CPU upgrades every year would.

Kaveri won't be using DDR4 since DDR4 is still pretty far away being adopted universally, and even then when it releases, the prices would be omega high. Kaveri is still on track to release late this year, probably sometime around the APU13 convention in November.

Kaveri's graphics are said to be around the power of a Radeon HD 7750 at stock, and since it'll be based on the GCN architecture, we can expect it to crossfire with perhaps an HD 7770 or maybe even an HD 7790. That would make for some killer budget gaming rigs. Current APU's like Trinity and Richland can already play most modern games at decent settings with playable framerates at 1080p, so it'll be interesting to see what Kaveri can do at its full potential (overclocked and fed good high-clocked RAM).

In the future, with Excavator APU's and beyond, we'll see even bigger gains and much more efficiency in computing and power usage as well. Excavator will be the "full" implementation of HSA, so that'll be nice. AMD's ultimate goal is to completely fuse the CPU and GPU. Eventually the need for discreet cards won't exist except for people who do enthusiast-level gaming (multi-monitor and multi-GPU setup, or play games that require ridiculous hardware to get good frames in) or people who need the extra juice for compute stuff like OpenCL.
 
NaroonGTX said:
^It is quite a big thing, really. HSA will advance the industry a lot more than just small incremental CPU upgrades every year would.

Kaveri won't be using DDR4 since DDR4 is still pretty far away being adopted universally, and even then when it releases, the prices would be omega high. Kaveri is still on track to release late this year, probably sometime around the APU13 convention in November.

Kaveri's graphics are said to be around the power of a Radeon HD 7750 at stock, and since it'll be based on the GCN architecture, we can expect it to crossfire with perhaps an HD 7770 or maybe even an HD 7790. That would make for some killer budget gaming rigs. Current APU's like Trinity and Richland can already play most modern games at decent settings with playable framerates at 1080p, so it'll be interesting to see what Kaveri can do at its full potential (overclocked and fed good high-clocked RAM).

In the future, with Excavator APU's and beyond, we'll see even bigger gains and much more efficiency in computing and power usage as well. Excavator will be the "full" implementation of HSA, so that'll be nice. AMD's ultimate goal is to completely fuse the CPU and GPU. Eventually the need for discreet cards won't exist except for people who do enthusiast-level gaming (multi-monitor and multi-GPU setup, or play games that require ridiculous hardware to get good frames in) or people who need the extra juice for compute stuff like OpenCL.
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Its all quite impressive.
I find it amusing to hear about people bashing AMD as they're developing the future of fusion, and little do these people know that they'll end up using it at some point.
 
Intel is old hat. They just happen to be making very nice hats at the moment.
 
I'm finnish and I felt the need to point out that "Kaveri" means "Friend" in finnish. There, I said it.

edit: And "apu" means "help" :D

so...help, I need a friend?
 
Zuul said:
I'm finnish and I felt the need to point out that "Kaveri" means "Friend" in finnish. There, I said it.

edit: And "apu" means "help" :D

so...help, I need a friend?
Click to expand...

Ha! Rather interesting I must say.
 
Zuul said:
I'm finnish and I felt the need to point out that "Kaveri" means "Friend" in finnish. There, I said it.

edit: And "apu" means "help" :D

so...help, I need a friend?
Click to expand...

I knew about the "friend" thing, but not the apu thing. Both are mere coincidences though, but pretty cool ones nonetheless. Kaveri is also the name of a river in India, as well as Kabini, which is where AMD got the names from.

The "friend" meaning is cooler though, and also cute :p. It makes sense (CPU and GPU working together for a greater good.)
 
Serrix said:
With Kaveri coming out next year, along with DDR4 RAM (Maybe even before that), it will be nice to see that these AMD APUs will be backing some power behind them. Being shrunk down to 28NM will also show a nice change.
The main interest though will be the graphics running off of the DDR4 RAM.
What kind of power should we expect to see from future integrated graphics?
Click to expand...

Kaveri is due for release the 2nd half of this year and no DDR4.
Someone already posted that DDR4 is not the thing you should expect miracles from the 1st few shipments of DDR4 can be slower as the current DDR3 high end.

Kaveri already has some features which will make it shine, it allows both gpu and cpu to access the same memory.

How it is working now is that cpu has to copy it to video ram, not doing this means somewhat of a performance gain.

The APU might get faster depending on how things evolve on the "sideport" memory trick that AMD wanted to use with onboard GDDR5 for FM2+.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Kaveri is due for release the 2nd half of this year and no DDR4.
Someone already posted that DDR4 is not the thing you should expect miracles from the 1st few shipments of DDR4 can be slower as the current DDR3 high end.

Kaveri already has some features which will make it shine, it allows both gpu and cpu to access the same memory.

How it is working now is that cpu has to copy it to video ram, not doing this means somewhat of a performance gain.

The APU might get faster depending on how things evolve on the "sideport" memory trick that AMD wanted to use with onboard GDDR5 for FM2+.
Click to expand...

The use of onboard GDDR5 for FM2+ would be quite the thing to see.
And I wasn't aware of DDR4 for being somewhat worse than DDR3 on release, but then again I should've expected that; New, immature tech.
 
Yeah, initial DDR4 speeds would either be less than or about equal to current high-end DDR3 speeds. In other words, you'd be spending much more money for very little benefit. And what's even funnier is how super-high RAM speeds aren't even needed by most things. Discreet GPU's use their own DDR3 or GDDR5 memory banks, and even speeds like 1333MHz of DDR3 is enough for modern-day system memory in rigs.

When it comes to APU's, simply increasing the speed of the RAM isn't enough to increase the performance of the starved iGPU's. Some form of GDDR5 would be a godsend, but there's also the issue of the narrow memory buses and bandwidth (GDDR5 would put it on par with current discreet offerings). But on the recent roadmaps, there was no mention of GDDR5 for Kaveri, and all instances of mention were removed from the revised internal documents as well. The rumors of Kaveri having a dual-IMC for DDR3/GDDR5 seem to be unfounded now.
 
NaroonGTX said:
Yeah, initial DDR4 speeds would either be less than or about equal to current high-end DDR3 speeds. In other words, you'd be spending much more money for very little benefit. And what's even funnier is how super-high RAM speeds aren't even needed by most things. Discreet GPU's use their own DDR3 or GDDR5 memory banks, and even speeds like 1333MHz of DDR3 is enough for modern-day system memory in rigs.

When it comes to APU's, simply increasing the speed of the RAM isn't enough to increase the performance of the starved iGPU's. Some form of GDDR5 would be a godsend, but there's also the issue of the narrow memory buses and bandwidth (GDDR5 would put it on par with current discreet offerings). But on the recent roadmaps, there was no mention of GDDR5 for Kaveri, and all instances of mention were removed from the revised internal documents as well. The rumors of Kaveri having a dual-IMC for DDR3/GDDR5 seem to be unfounded now.
Click to expand...

If Kaveri had a dual-IMC, it'd be quite the APU I'd say, but for now with what I've learned, AMD is being smart and playing it safe using DDR3. Can hardly blame them either now, too.
Even if GDDR5 would stop the iGPU of an APU from being starved, I hardly believe it'd be very stable at first. Given some time though, imagine the possibilites!
 
I'm really interested in seeing how the steam roller cores affect Kaveri. Also interested to see how well it does in gaming at 1080p.
 
The Steamroller cores will most likely end up leaving even Piledriver in the dust. You guys might've seen it already, but a leaked die shot of what many people speculate to have been Steamroller (it was a shot of a single module), Steamroller's design has appeared to have advanced to Steamroller 2.0. It has some enhancements like a much larger L1i cache, the INT cores have been beefed up more, the L1d cache is bigger, there's two FP/SIMD units, and they seem to have doubled up on a lot of things as well.

I think the GDDR5 would easily be stable, the main problems are a) figuring out how the GDDR5 will factor into the equation (sideport memory, soldered onto the board or what? In which case people would have to buy new boards, but Kaveri needs new boards for FM2+ anyway, so yeah lol) and b) actual costs... GDDR5 would cost more to implement, and these APU's would theoretically be only available in BGA packages, so there wouldn't be any upgrade paths for the actual chip itself.
 
I'm excited for Kaveri. I want to do a super SFF htpc, gaming rig. Something that can do decent gaming on a 90w power supply. The Antec ISK 110 case as a living room gaming machine mounted to the back of the TV would be pretty cool.
 
Droogie128 said:
I'm excited for Kaveri. I want to do a super SFF htpc, gaming rig. Something that can do decent gaming on a 90w power supply. The Antec ISK 110 case as a living room gaming machine mounted to the back of the TV would be pretty cool.
Click to expand...

That would be nice, I'd put the system on a 200W PSU though, just for some safe keeping.
 
NaroonGTX said:
The Steamroller cores will most likely end up leaving even Piledriver in the dust. You guys might've seen it already, but a leaked die shot of what many people speculate to have been Steamroller (it was a shot of a single module), Steamroller's design has appeared to have advanced to Steamroller 2.0. It has some enhancements like a much larger L1i cache, the INT cores have been beefed up more, the L1d cache is bigger, there's two FP/SIMD units, and they seem to have doubled up on a lot of things as well.

I think the GDDR5 would easily be stable, the main problems are a) figuring out how the GDDR5 will factor into the equation (sideport memory, soldered onto the board or what? In which case people would have to buy new boards, but Kaveri needs new boards for FM2+ anyway, so yeah lol) and b) actual costs... GDDR5 would cost more to implement, and these APU's would theoretically be only available in BGA packages, so there wouldn't be any upgrade paths for the actual chip itself.
Click to expand...

So it'd end up being like those VGA board combo type deals where you get the board plus say one of the AMD E processors? Seems unlikely that they'd do that.
 
Serrix said:
The use of onboard GDDR5 for FM2+ would be quite the thing to see.
And I wasn't aware of DDR4 for being somewhat worse than DDR3 on release, but then again I should've expected that; New, immature tech.
Click to expand...

Kaveri's IMC is reported to be able to support either DDR3 or GDDR5, which gives embedded manufacturers (like laptops) the option to use DDR3 (for better CPU performance) or GDDR5 (for better iGPU performance). In any case, GDDR5 is just a variant of DDR3.

DDR4 and GDDR6 will be the new set of RAM, which won't be ready until late 2014 at the earliest. Kaveri is supposed to be out at the end of this year, there's no way AMD is releasing a CPU without RAM available for it on the market. Intel's delay of Haswell-E is likely due to DDR4 delays.
 
Serrix said:
It feels like AMD is late to the party on some things. (Although I am too on this subject)
As they know that RAM is essential to the graphics of an APU, why would they not use the upcoming DDR4 that would give an advantage over DDR3?
Another question though is how is the upcoming PS4 using GDDR5 RAM and how is the APU going to take advantage of it if even Kaveri can't use DDR4?
Click to expand...

AMD's current generation of cpu designs already have issues with high cache latencies. Switching over to DDR4 or 5 would only incur even more unwanted latency.
 
I can't wait to buy super expensive new memory to run cheap cpu tied to mediocry GPU.

It's almost as funny as first Apus needing expensive then DDR3 1866+
 
Michaelius said:
I can't wait to buy super expensive new memory to run cheap cpu tied to mediocry GPU.

It's almost as funny as first Apus needing expensive then DDR3 1866+
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Be a smart shopper, it's peoples fault for not buying things on sale or used.
Seriously, people shouldn't get upset because they were a fool to pay full retail.
RAM isn't even that expensive anyways (right now luckily, DDR4 will probably be ridiculous) but if people care so much, most of it can be bought used for usually 2/3s of the price. And if they insist on new, plenty of it can be found for $10-$15 off.
And $100-$120 for an overclockable quadcore with practically an integrated Radeon 6670 (And in the future, it'll be even stronger)? You can bet I'll be on top of it. Even more so when A85X boards are Usually $80-$100 and they are loaded with bells and whistles. Oh, and it gets better; Hybrid crossfire/Lucid Virtu Tech and a low power/heat output. What's this? Mini-Itx FM2 motherboards? I can actually build a cheap HTPC?

Don't get me wrong, Intel is great and all, but these APUs are fantastic.
And don't mistake me for a fanboy, typing this off of a Pentium M machine that I adore for being 10 years old.
 
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Michaelius said:
I can't wait to buy super expensive new memory to run cheap cpu tied to mediocry GPU.

It's almost as funny as first Apus needing expensive then DDR3 1866+
Click to expand...

Troll harder. You have no idea what you're even talking about, so I'm not gonna waste any time explaining anything. Just lol @ you.
 
Serrix said:
That would be nice, I'd put the system on a 200W PSU though, just for some safe keeping.
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I won't be too worried, as long as AMD can bring the power consumption down this time around

I'd run the i3 2100 on my htpc on that psu without any worry right now. It's just the i3 and an ssd. Won't even come close to 90w.
 
Droogie128 said:
I won't be too worried, as long as AMD can bring the power consumption down this time around

I'd run the i3 2100 on my htpc on that psu without any worry right now. It's just the i3 and an ssd. Won't even come close to 90w.
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Wow, that's not bad at all really; If an i3 system can run off of 90w, then there's not much reason an APU system can't, A4 to A6/A8 Non-k (Maybe even k). Like you said though, AMD just needs to make that power consumption lower.
 
Droogie128 said:
I won't be too worried, as long as AMD can bring the power consumption down this time around

I'd run the i3 2100 on my htpc on that psu without any worry right now. It's just the i3 and an ssd. Won't even come close to 90w.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's not bad at all really; If an i3 system can run off of 90w, then there's not much reason an APU system can't, A4 to A6/A8 Non-k (Maybe even k). Like you said though, AMD just needs to make that power consumption lower.
 
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Droogie128 said:
I won't be too worried, as long as AMD can bring the power consumption down this time around

I'd run the i3 2100 on my htpc on that psu without any worry right now. It's just the i3 and an ssd. Won't even come close to 90w.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's not bad at all really; If an i3 system can run off of 90w, then there's not much reason an APU system can't, A4 to A6/A8 Non-k (Maybe even k). Like you said though, AMD just needs to make that power consumption lower.
 
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