AMD has denied that it has cancelled Kaveri and that it intends to terminate “big core” development in favour of Kabini-based hardware with new ARM bits.
SemiAccurate claims that AMD killed its big-core design team in the last round of layoffs, effectively cancelling both Steamroller (the CPU half of Kaveri) and Excavator. But according to AMD the rumours are pants. Phil Hughes, senior AMD spokesperson said that Kaveri with the Steamroller core is still a product in development. He added that AMD was continuing to develop big cores.
While Semiaccurate is good at getting these types of story, there are some weaknesses in the theme. AMD still needs a some products that it can bring to market while it gets Kabini ready and integrates ARMv8 architecture. Piledriver can't hold until 2014 without AMD walking from the market completely.