Haswell vs Kaveri

[OpenGL guy]

I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. Your minor tirade about how APU's are supposed to be cheap and easy is a strawman to the conversation at hand. That, or else you're still missing the point entirely and are simply unaware of it.

Really?

So people are expected to pay $75 more for the RAM in order to increase the performance of an iGPU which costs $65 in its higher performance version?

I thought one of the biggest points of the APU was to be cost-effective.

This argument fails:
- The 8GB of slower system memory you would have bought is not free
- The discrete card adds more cost since you need to pair it with a CPU as well
- The discrete card uses more power
- The discrete card limits form factor

Maybe this thread has gotten too confusing with everyone arguing different things.

Yes, I see you saying that APU's are destined for cheaper machines with a different set of tradeoffs.

Yes, I see you saying that APU's will never perform like a discrete card and people who assume otherwise will be perennially disappointed.

Yes, I see telling us that maybe we don't understand the amount of bandwidth required by a modern CPU.

None of these things are on topic, they are all tangential to the core question. Why would AMD snap in a whole bunch more shading and ROP power, only to link it to a memory subsystem that we can already prove is insufficient? That's the question.

Have any thoughts on that?

I won't discuss anything that is not released, but APUs are definitely relevant to the market. Kabini is a great chip, go check it out. Does Kabini have twice the bandwidth of Brazos? How does Kabini compare performance-wise to Brazos?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Really?
This argument fails:
- The 8GB of slower system memory you would have bought is not free
- The discrete card adds more cost since you need to pair it with a CPU as well
- The discrete card uses more power
- The discrete card limits form factor

Wow, since you're playing "someone is wrong on the internet" let's refute what you wrote there :

Wow, you guys are really grasping at straws here. APUs are cheaper for the following reasons:
- No reason to buy a discrete graphics card with its own memory
- Shares power with the CPU
- Shares memory with the CPU

Since you don't need a discrete card for graphics, this allows for smaller form factors as well as other cost savings (power supply, board connectors, case, etc.).

- A high-end A10 costs about the same as a 750K + Radeon 6670 or 7730
- Cheapest PSU worth buying are 300W or 350W, enough for a graphics card up to 7790 or GTX 650ti w/ 2GB.
- You can't get cheaper than a micro ATX case, which will happily take that vid card as well

In effect, you can get a mini ITX board, case and 150W PSU to build a small system if that's what you want, or slim micro ATX, but it will cost more and you need a CPU cooler as well.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Really?

This argument fails:
- The 8GB of slower system memory you would have bought is not free
- The discrete card adds more cost since you need to pair it with a CPU as well
- The discrete card uses more power
- The discrete card limits form factor

Maybe this thread has gotten too confusing with everyone arguing different things.

I'm sorry but too confusing for you. ToTTenTranz's post which you quote all the time was simply a comment to Jimbo's suggestion on boosting the bandwidth from 24GB/s to 40GB/s by using a faster and very expensive memory. He wasn't making any far reaching comparison's of APU vs discrete, but only questioning that having to pay 75$ more for faster memory just to boost the bandwidth to a still low total speed is a questionable choice.

 

[imaxx]

- A high-end A10 costs about the same as a 750K + Radeon 6670 or 7730
- Cheapest PSU worth buying are 300W or 350W, enough for a graphics card up to 7790 or GTX 650ti w/ 2GB.
- You can't get cheaper than a micro ATX case, which will happily take that vid card as well

Are you aware of the gross prices and the cost to design a motherboard of a notebook, or the price an OEM manufacturer REALLY pays for its components? If not, and you use retail prices only, the point looks moot.

If you put up a notebook, looks like an APU is always a win/win situation as the gl guy pointed out.
For desktop market, lower backet APU makes the saving. In the end, if you need an APU, you only occasionally play games.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

If you put up a notebook, looks like an APU is always a win/win situation as the gl guy pointed out.
For desktop market, lower backet APU makes the saving. In the end, if you need an APU, you only occasionally play games.

Right because high power chips and high-clocked RAM are a great plan in a laptop, especially if all you "only occasionally play games"...

High-speed DRAM is simply not competitive with on-chip memory in power (and latency). It's a stop gap solution at best and I'd be surprised if AMD actually pushed it for anything other than "halo" benchmark machines.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

This argument fails:
- The 8GB of slower system memory you would have bought is not free
- The discrete card adds more cost since you need to pair it with a CPU as well
- The discrete card uses more power
- The discrete card limits form factor

Maybe this thread has gotten too confusing with everyone arguing different things.

Just in case you didn't notice, you're the only one who completely missed the point in my post.
Take a deep breadth, check the links I put in the post (some of which you probably missed) and try to get there a second time.

I only questioned the advantage of paying a premium for faster memory over paying the premium (same amount of money in the end) of a discrete card that will perform better in the end.

I won't discuss anything that is not released, but APUs are definitely relevant to the market. Kabini is a great chip, go check it out. Does Kabini have twice the bandwidth of Brazos? How does Kabini compare performance-wise to Brazos?

Kabini has about twice the memory bandwidth-per-GFLOPs of a Kaveri with dual-channel DDR3-1866. It was 1/4 the computing resources and half the memory bandwidth.

 

[jimbo75]

Just to note, you can pick up 2400MHz RAM for much cheaper if you look around a bit - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313398

Team Vulcan is a pretty good brand, and that memory is a steal at $80. Note however that I have previously built Trinity systems with this RAM and it had problems running at 1866 (I had to downclock and sell it at 1600MHz before it worked properly)...so it might not be on the compatibility list.

Edit - Found even better stuff for a buck less - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313323

So if you keep it sensible it should be just about viable to make something with good performance for the money. Still talking ~40 GB/s and that should help to push it much closer to 7750 performance.

 

[eastmen]

Just in case you didn't notice, you're the only one who completely missed the point in my post.
Take a deep breadth, check the links I put in the post (some of which you probably missed) and try to get there a second time.

I only questioned the advantage of paying a premium for faster memory over paying the premium (same amount of money in the end) of a discrete card that will perform better in the end.




Kabini has about twice the memory bandwidth-per-GFLOPs of a Kaveri with dual-channel DDR3-1866. It was 1/4 the computing resources and half the memory bandwidth.

I'm not sure i'm following Tottentranz.

If you buy an APU set up you pay for

APU
Ram


If you buy a discrete card package you buy

CPU
Ram
GPU

Then for both you buy secondary parts (mobo/bluray what have you)

But if your already paying for ram , the bump up to faster ram is no where near the cost of a decent discrete gpu.

8 gigs of ddr 3 1600 is $80

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233309

8GB of DDR 3 2133 will cost $102 up to $160
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0006142&IsNodeId=1&name=DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)

same company product.

I'm not quite sure what great video card you will get for a $20 price difference. THe premiums don't match up.

 

[sir doris]

I'm not sure i'm following Tottentranz.

If you buy an APU set up you pay for

APU
Ram


If you buy a discrete card package you buy

CPU
Ram
GPU

Then for both you buy secondary parts (mobo/bluray what have you)

But if your already paying for ram , the bump up to faster ram is no where near the cost of a decent discrete gpu.

8 gigs of ddr 3 1600 is $80

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233309

8GB of DDR 3 2133 will cost $102 up to $160
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0006142&IsNodeId=1&name=DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)

same company product.

I'm not quite sure what great video card you will get for a $20 price difference. THe premiums don't match up.

But if you go the discrete video card route you can get a cheaper CPU too.

 

[eastmen]

Ill have to look at prices.

 

[sir doris]

What would be better for games, an A10 6800K or Haswell Dual Core Pentium with an HD7770 (GDDR5)?

 

[Blazkowicz]

Are you aware of the gross prices and the cost to design a motherboard of a notebook, or the price an OEM manufacturer REALLY pays for its components? If not, and you use retail prices only, the point looks moot.

If you put up a notebook, looks like an APU is always a win/win situation as the gl guy pointed out.
For desktop market, lower backet APU makes the saving. In the end, if you need an APU, you only occasionally play games.

Yes laptops is a use case, if OEMs can be arsed to design a laptop around it - provide adequate cooling for a sustained 45 watts on one chip while making it ultra cheap and barely thick enough for the RJ45 connector. Note that it's 10 watts higher than a 35 watt CPU.

About occasional vs "hard core" gamers, some may disagree with you. A lot of them play Valve/Blizzard games and stuff like Trackmania, Minecraft intensively. There an APU can work. This is the kind of people that leave comments on web shops like "wow this Radeon 6450 is a lot better than what I expected, now I can run all my games at full res/details!"

 

[jimbo75]

What would be better for games, an A10 6800K or Haswell Dual Core Pentium with an HD7770 (GDDR5)?

The Pentium and 7770 would be (a lot) better in the vast majority of current games, but some would suffer badly due to the dual core and by the looks of where the industry is going, dual cores are also seriously struggling in upcoming games. Don't forget you're also stuck with an inferior CPU when not gaming.

 

[Blazkowicz]

What would be better for games, an A10 6800K or Haswell Dual Core Pentium with an HD7770 (GDDR5)?

The latter will be immensely superior in most/many games but the former might be possibly better with some highly threaded and inherently CPU limited games.. like some kind of flight simulator or simulation game.
Though the Pentium has considerably faster single-threaded performance so a game with one very demanding thread and several lightweight ones might work well comparatively. It's very game dependant. Also CPU wise the 6800K is quite outdated, it compares with Athlon II, Phenom II, Core2Quad roughly. We're all waiting for Steamroller to better answer that question.

In short, depends on the games (pathological ones *might* make the Pentium suffer). The Pentium rig is easily upgradable to i5 though, you can stick a dedicated GPU to the APU rig but it makes the APU's graphics you paid for useless.

 

[jimbo75]

About occasional vs "hard core" gamers, some may disagree with you. A lot of them play Valve/Blizzard games and stuff like Trackmania, Minecraft intensively. There an APU can work. This is the kind of people that leave comments on web shops like "wow this Radeon 6450 is a lot better than what I expected, now I can run all my games at full res/details!"

There are still a shit ton of people using ancient monitors and on 1280x1024 res and below, any quad APU will chew through any game at that res.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Don't forget you're also stuck with an inferior CPU when not gaming.

Except when e.g. web browsing : a 3GHz Haswell is a ton faster than a 4GHz Piledriver.
4GHz Piledriver is playing catch-up with the 2.6GHz Ivy Bridge Celeron.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I'm not sure i'm following Tottentranz.

If you buy an APU set up you pay for

APU
Ram


If you buy a discrete card package you buy

CPU
Ram
GPU

Then for both you buy secondary parts (mobo/bluray what have you)

But if your already paying for ram , the bump up to faster ram is no where near the cost of a decent discrete gpu.

8 gigs of ddr 3 1600 is $80

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233309

8GB of DDR 3 2133 will cost $102 up to $160
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0006142&IsNodeId=1&name=DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)

same company product.

I'm not quite sure what great video card you will get for a $20 price difference. THe premiums don't match up.

The $75 price premium for faster RAM that I mentioned was actually a quote from jimbo75's suggestion for using DDR3-2600.

Using DDR3-2600 would be just 2/3rd of the bandwidth of the original HD7750 GDDR5. Actually less than that because the CPU takes its toll, even if not in a sustained way. DDR3-2133 wouldn't be all that much better either.


But let's do that process then, using as similar hardware as possible, between APU+ fast DDR3 vs. CPU+GPU+cheap DDR3.


APU+fast DDR3:
APU: A10-6800K Richland 4.2GHz for $150
DDR3: 2*4GB DDR3-2666 for $95 (the cheapest DDR3-2666 I could find).
Total: $245


CPU+cheap DDR3+Graphics card:
CPU: AMD 760K Richland 3.8GHz (APU with disabled iGPU) for $90
DDR3: 2*4GB DDR3-1333 for $60 (cheapest 8GB dual-channel kit I could find)
Graphics card: HD7750 with 1GB GDDR5 for $90.
Total: $240
Plus, from here we can get all kinds of sweetspots with little more money. $10 more and we could buy a HD7770 GHz with 1GB GDDR5, which has 50% more shader power than the HD7750, leaving the iGPU in Kaveri way behind in gaming performance.

Both use the same motherboard and any cheap power supply will be more than enough for both systems.
Assuming that a full Kaveri will cost $150 at launch, it's still more advantageous to just spare the money on a simpler CPU and RAM and just go with the dGPU.

If this is the standard setup for Kaveri, then it's not cost-effective. Not for the low-end gaming destkop market anyway.
Even with iGPU+dGPU Crossfire in mind, it's still not cost effective. For $325 (APU+fast DDR3+ $80 Graphics card), one could buy again the cheaper CPU + cheaper RAM ($150) and spend $175 in a HD7870 GHz 2GB GDDR5, which would be way faster than two 512 GCN GPUs in CrossFire.


I could see the Kaveri iGPU+dGPU CF solution being more successful in the mid-end gaming laptop market. A Kaveri + HD7730M which AFAIK sells for cheap. iGPU for common usage, CF for gaming. That could be competitive with all the Intel + nVidia GK104/GK106 combos we see everywhere... assuming the Steamroller cores bring miraculous improvements in IPC...
But AMD has always had such a hard time getting APU design wins for laptops.. in no small part to poor CPU performance, I bet.

 

[fuboi]

Slightly OT, but couldn't think of a better thread:
Will AMD integrate TrueAudio(tm) into APUs? It would make sense, giving a nice boost to sound quality and a much needed reduction in CPU load and cache pressure. They integrate all the GPU's side-dishes already, but maybe the area cost of 384KB cache and some tiny DSPs is more palatable in a 200mm2 GPU than in a 70mm2 APU. Maybe as an extra feature for the bigger, more expensive, APU lines.

 

[mczak]

Slightly OT, but couldn't think of a better thread:
Will AMD integrate TrueAudio(tm) into APUs? It would make sense, giving a nice boost to sound quality and a much needed reduction in CPU load and cache pressure. They integrate all the GPU's side-dishes already, but maybe the area cost of 384KB cache and some tiny DSPs is more palatable in a 200mm2 GPU than in a 70mm2 APU. Maybe as an extra feature for the bigger, more expensive, APU lines.

I have actually wondered the same. I think though the low-end APUs are definitely out. Arguably those cpus would need it the most, but OTOH you can't get the "full" graphics with them neither so you can probably live without accurate sound effects too. Something like Kaveri though, why not?

 

[Lightman]

I have actually wondered the same. I think though the low-end APUs are definitely out. Arguably those cpus would need it the most, but OTOH you can't get the "full" graphics with them neither so you can probably live without accurate sound effects too. Something like Kaveri though, why not?

I've asked same question just after AMD's GPU14 conference.

There is some Kaveri slide showing DSP and Audio block but I could draw it myself (no I didn't). At least colours are right for AMD :smile:.