Long time since my last blog post. Since AMD is about to launch desktop Kaveri soon (in ~January) I wanted to write a couple of lines about what *I* think about this product launch.
During this year we have had a few "leaks" regarding Kaveri's performance. Conveniently none of these were solid enough to draw any meaningful conclusion regarding actual core performance or clock capabilities. We had a few low clocking and disproportionally low performing mobile parts listed at cosmology.org website and a few geekbench scores of desktop ES parts(single ch. memory). And that's it. Pretty vague and inconclusive.
Now people do have high expectations when it comes to Steamroller cores that power Kaveri, and the "blame" largely lies on AMD themselves. I know since I had them too. AMD did build up a hype with their presentations on HC last year and in a few interviews after that. We had hints of "solid" IPC jumps, new ISA support (turns out it's a few more instructions and not AVX2), quad channel IMC(GDDR5 mode ,4x32bit), 3 module parts, big iGPU perf. gains etc. What we have now is roughly the following:
1) 3 module version is scrapped due to reasons that will be obvious at launch;
2)quad channel GDDR5 support is gone also although IMC has the support sitting idle on-die(deactivated); figure that...
3)"IPC" can be substantially better
BUT only if one was to
cherry pick benchmarks and filter the "bad" ones(also related to number
1) and what constitutes a total performance of a chip )
4) If Richland had
memory BW problem then it will be a
minor one when compared to Kaveri.
I think I've said enough.
I've always expected that the 3rd iteration of Bulldozer core will bring us the most tangible results when it comes to removing bottlenecks and bringing the best from the concept of CMT core but due to wrong decisions on AMD's part this I'm afraid will just remain a dream.
As for me I have my Piledriver based X4 and it's doing fine at 4.2Ghz. I personally see nothing that Kaveri will bring on CPU side to sway me over and swap it in my board. Yeah, sorry folks.
.
Hope you like it. The scores are not out of this world like previous
time, so this is looking like a legit screenshot. Magic date is January
14.
. 7850K runs C15 at 3.7Ghz, it doesn't turbo up in this workload (at least not in the run that you see in the image above