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AMD launches mobile Kaveri APUs

by on04 June 2014



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AMD has officially launched its mobile Kaveri lineup, but the full specs were leaked a few weeks back and they were confirmed by AMD in late May.

In case you missed them, you can check out our lowdown here

Based on Steamroller CPU cores and GCN graphics, mobile Kaveri packs up to 12 compute cores, i.e. four CPU cores and 512 Radeon cores. AMD says the CPU can churn out up to 818GFLOPS. The GPUs support DirectX 11.2 and PCI Express 3.0 is on board too. Mobile Kaveri also supports UHD and 4K displays, so in theory it could be used on high-resolution laptops and all-in-ones.

AMD says its A10-7300 is on a par with Intel’s Core i5-4200U in PCMark and it ends up about 50 percent faster in 3DMark. The FX-7500 takes on the Core i7-4500U and it also ends up 50 percent faster in 3DMark. In addition to speedy GPUs, mobile Kaveri also boasts support for TrueAudio, which is an interesting audio technology introduced at the Hawaii launch. Sadly though, TrueAudio is still not supported in any game and it will be a while before it becomes relevant. 

Judging by the specs and performance figures, mobile Kaveri should end up quite a bit more competitive than mobile Richland, thanks to significantly higher clocks, new CPU/GPU architecture and of course the transition to a new manufacturing process. 

That’s not all though. It could be argued that the slow pace of Intel’s 14nm rollout is Kaveri’s real trump card. AMD’s new mobile APU will have to slug it out with Haswell parts for at least a couple of quarters, giving AMD ample time to close the gap.
AMD will have fresh silicon in time for the (increasingly less relevant) back-to-school timeframe and the holiday season. Broadwell should appear in time for the latter, but we still don’t know how many designs based on Intel’s new 14nm silicon will actually be available at the time and whether or not Intel will have mainstream parts at launch, so even then AMD could have value on its side.

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