AMD Kaveri Review : Focused on HSA Features

[DGLee]

After I'd dealt with Kaveri's Processor Graphics thoroughly, I focused on its HSA features which as of today have little meaning for everyday computing but also are believed to provide wider chances to HPC-level GFLOPS in sub-$200 chips. (A full CPU-aspect review on Kaveri is here : http://udteam.tistory.com/)

Today, I want to introduce and share some HSA-based benchmarks. Let's have a look.

(All comparison groups are featured GTX 780 Ti and thus unable to boost their score via Accelerated mode in the most recent version of PCMark 8 except Kaveri : Its internal GPU wouldn't be disabled whether or not a discrete Graphics Card is installed. Actually user can manually choose to use it or not. Indeed, CPU-only OpenCL acceleration actually slows the performance down just like a CPU is trying to handle PhysX by its own)

How's your opinion? Is Kaveri an attractive chip?

 

[RCoon]

Is Kaveri an attractive chip?

Only if HSA get's adopted widely. Without it, it's just yet another generic mid-range consumer chip.

 

[joyman]

The HSA evolution is amazing. They are on schedule - 2015 GPU will be even more integrated in the CPU part.

 

[ne6togadno]

Only if HSA get's adopted widely. Without it, it's just yet another generic mid-range consumer chip.

sooner or later it should be adopted. amd is pushing it this way for a lot of time and the way things going now i expect they will continue in this direction in future. with mantle allowing utilizaiton of cpu, gpu and ram from single api and cf comunication moved to pcie i expect next step to be unified use of system ram from cpu and discrete gpu. first as direct access from cpu to gpu pipelines and vise versa later gpu ram removed and system ram used from both cpu and gpu.

note: all above is just my personal speculations. they are based solely on my deductions and not to any official or unofficial info from amd so no need to put interwebz on fire.

 

[suraswami]

Only if HSA get's adopted widely. Without it, it's just yet another generic mid-range consumer chip.

If AMD starts to bribe more than what Intel bribes then may be we can see code favoring AMD?

 

[yogurt_21]

do the Playstation 4 and Xbox One use HSA?

 

[ne6togadno]

yes

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

If AMD starts to bribe more than what Intel bribes then may be we can see code favoring AMD?

Read up on the HSA foundation, The balls not soley in AMD's court, the largest chip maker out there and many other mobile and system on a chip vendors are all signed up for HSA so its over all success is as assured as the mobile revolution's future is.

 

[erocker]

Neat! Let me know when it's relevant to everyday computing tasks!

 

[Ravenas]

What card does the 7850k hybrid crossfire with?

 

[Frick]

Read up on the HSA foundation, The balls not soley in AMD's court, the largest chip maker out there and many other mobile and system on a chip vendors are all signed up for HSA so its over all success is as assured as the mobile revolution's future is.

Yep.

Neat! Let me know when it's relevant to everyday computing tasks!

Encoding stuff is borderline everyday imo.

 

[Nordic]

Pcmark is supposed to be for every day computing tasks. Libre office could be an every day task. You don't even need i5, i7's overclocked for every day tasks. Encoding and similar tasks are where we actually need more speed.

 

[erocker]

Encoding stuff is borderline everyday imo.

Agreed. Does encoding/HSA work right now?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Dude. I would guess the same could well have been said about many things in computers sse1234 avx , gpu's. Perhaps with time you may see its worth eh

 

[LeonVolcove]

no game benchmarks?

 

[BiggieShady]

AMD will obviously leverage their huge console APU user base to push HSA. One has to wonder how easy PS4/XB1 HSA code can be ported to Kaveri APU. Because HSA adoption mostly depends on that. Currently, almost every HSA enabled chip in the world is in a console.

 

[TRWOV]

no game benchmarks?

No game uses HSA right now.

 

[theFOoL]

What card does the 7850k hybrid crossfire with?

R7 240 and R7 250

 

[xenocide]

No game uses HSA right now.

It's part of AMD's confusing strategy to push Mantle (a low level API) simultaneously with OpenCL (the highest of levels).