Some previously unseen details about AMD’s next-generation Kaveri APU have been revealed in a leaked slide posted by little known extreme specifications site Extreme Spec. The new range of processors is expected for desktops in January 2014 and we already know quite a few details of what will make up the Kaveri APU. However the new slide fleshes out the details quite nicely.
20 per cent boost to CPU, 30 per cent boost to graphics
Two highlights of the new Kaveri APU are the performance of the CPU and GPU components. The slide mentions that the ‘Steamroller B’ CPU cores present in the next gen APU can offer a performance which surpasses Richland APUs by as much as 20 per cent. Kaveri contains up to four such CPU cores, 4MB of L2 cache and temperature smart functionality.
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Boasting an even better performance hike is the GCN part of the APU. This, based on a pre-silicon projection, will yield up to 30 per cent better performance that the current Richland design. Further new graphics features supported by Kaveri are detailed as; the Universal Video Decode engine 4.2, VCE 2.0 video compression and an ACP audio co-processor.
Looking at absolute numbers we previously learnt that the 3.7GHz AMD A10-7850K Kaveri APU offers a combined all-cores performance of 856 GFLOPS.
A dedicated PCIe SSD interface
The Bolton chipset which accompanies the Kaveri boasts a few performance niceties of its own. The chipset has a dedicated PCIe interface for SSD drives, a 3rd generation PCI2 x16 slot for discrete GPUs and onboard support for resolutions up to 4096x2160 pixels.
The slide concludes with details about mobile-related specs such as battery-life, MobileMark07 and low TDPs between 15W and 25W being targeted, so one could conclude this slide, with its performance claims, refers to a mobile Kaveri APU not previously talked about by AMD. Nevertheless these are interesting new morsels of information to mull over as we await the launch of the first Kaveri APUs.