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AMD Richland launches. Kind of.

QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,348

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/new-amd-a-series-2013mar12.aspx

At the moment, it's for laptops only, though a desktop version is surely coming shortly.  No independent benchmarks are available, however.

I take it that this means that AMD has given partners the go-ahead to start selling laptops with Richland as soon as they're ready.  AMD expects that to happen later this month.  It does take some time to go from "box of AMD processors arrives at laptop manufacturer" to "completed laptops are available for sale at retailers everywhere", and AMD presumably didn't want to impose any more artificial wait than necessary.

As for what the chips offer, it's on that link.  Basically, take Trinity, replace the older VLIW4 graphics by newer GCN, clock everything higher, and you've got Richland.  They have basically the same corresponding bins, even, though the low-voltage Richland chips aren't ready yet.

Comparing an AMD A10-5750M to the older A10-4600M, the CPU clock speed is up from 2.3-3.2 GHz to 2.5-3.5 GHz.  The GPU clock speed is up from 497-686 MHz to 533-720 MHz.  Architectural changes should boost GPU performance a bit more than the clock speed difference would indicate as well, even with the same number of shaders as before.  Memory supported goes up from 1600 MHz to 1866 MHz, though I don't expect to see many laptops offer it with 1866 MHz memory.  And this all stays within the same 35 W TDP as before.

Richland is a nice bump over Trinity, especially considering that it's on the same process node as before.  But someone with a Trinity laptop shouldn't rush out to replace it by Richland.  I recently advised a real-life friend to buy a Trinity laptop because it's cheap right now as vendors want to get rid of it to make way for Richland.

The real advance will come around the end of this year when AMD launches Kaveri.  That will offer a die shrink, a new CPU architecture which AMD promises will be much faster, and rumored DDR4 and/or GDDR5 memory support.  I don't believe the GDDR5 rumors, but halfway expect AMD to do with Kaveri roughly what they did with Deneb (Phenom II X4):  make it their first DDR4 product, but also offer DDR3 support.  That way, it still works if DDR4 memory isn't ready or is still excessively expensive, while allowing vendors to switch to the faster, lower power DDR4 as soon as it is available and suitably priced.

Comments

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,348

    Apparently I was mistaken, and Richland graphics are still VLIW4, not GCN.

    AMD apparently got some gains out of a more intelligent turbo boost, which will check to see if the CPU is bottlenecking the GPU or vice versa.  For example, if you're playing a game and the GPU is only at 50% utilization because it's waiting on the CPU, then it will clock and volt the GPU lower to save on power consumption, allowing it to clock the CPU higher, increasing your net performance.

    AMD also got some gains out of checking temperature directly to allow for higher turbo clock speeds when it's measurably safe, rather than having to make very conservative assumptions about temperature.

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