[cal_guy]

Originally Posted by Exophase

I suppose the lower TDP mobile parts won't be nearly as bandwidth limited, if the available bandwidth is as high for them. And this is where Intel will be competing. The on-package memory should still give Haswell a power efficiency boost, though.

I don't think Intel is really playing that seriously in the desktop IGP game; they want to give something that provides some baseline that's "good enough", whatever that means, but not that especially with AMD. It's not that hard to see why, when you can outdo an IGP with a net cost increase of maybe $50-75 for a discrete GPU. The situation for the mobile devices is totally different, where the IGP buys you better battery life and a smaller/lighter form factor. So I can see why Intel would be more interested in playing in the latter domain than the former.

I'm actually kind of wondering if AMD is that committed to desktop IGPs either. Does anyone know how Llano performed here? I'm curious because it will have taken them such a long time to release desktop Trinity, even though it should have been ready ages ago. There was probably some bug or something they had to fix, but if this was any kind of priority for them you'd think they could have taken care of it sooner.

I know in the future IGP on the desktop is supposed to offer some computational benefit over discretes due to closer coupling of CPU and GPU resources but AMD is going to have a really hard road ahead of them creating enough killer apps to really sell people on this..

Is there really much of a supply of cheap under $70 GPU anymore. Most of the under $100 GPU are older designs like HD 5570 and GT 440 with DDR3 memory that don't offer much over the Trinity IGP.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by cal_guy

Is there really much of a supply of cheap under $70 GPU anymore. Most of the under $100 GPU are older designs like HD 5570 and GT 440 with DDR3 memory that don't offer much over the Trinity IGP.

When I said $50-$75 I was also factoring in the cost you pay getting a Trinity IGP instead of something that has the same or CPU capability but no IGP. Of course, right now such a thing may not be exactly available but Vishera will change that. Last I was aware you also pay a slight premium for the motherboard.

Newegg is turning up a fair number of HD 7750s, 6670s, and 6750s (and one 6770) with GDDR5 that can probably outperform Trinity. And even when those discrete cards are using DDR3 they still have the advantage of using dedicated buses not shared with the CPU.

[Blazkowicz]

Motherboards are decently cheap for AMD APUs (current llano ones), with cosmetic difference between the two chipset options. Actually you can ignore there's two chipsets because there are quite full featured mobos with the lower end one, as funny as it is.

the only cheaper AM3+ mobos would be the lowest end ones that take a 95W FX with no overclock headroom but they suck, they're more for the lower power older CPUs. (you can still build a sempron with geforce 6100 if you want cheap and play quake 1 under linux)

[jimbo75]

I think AMD has to go with eDRAM or something else in order to basically force the performance of the entry level discrete to be much higher than it is now. There would be a couple of pretty big bonuses to that - Nvidia would be further squeezed at the bottom end (I guess anything lower than a 640 is already pointless?), and there would be less chance of a combo of say, a pentium and an 8750-type card from being a faster gaming machine than the Kaveri's at a lower price.

[Alexko]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

I think AMD has to go with eDRAM or something else in order to basically force the performance of the entry level discrete to be much higher than it is now. There would be a couple of pretty big bonuses to that - Nvidia would be further squeezed at the bottom end (I guess anything lower than a 640 is already pointless?), and there would be less chance of a combo of say, a pentium and an 8750-type card from being a faster gaming machine than the Kaveri's at a lower price.

That's probably the plan. Kaveri will have 512 GCN SPs, up from Trinity's 384 VLIW-4 ones, so that alone should be quite a substantial bump. If there's no meaningful improvement on the memory front, it's going to be seriously bottlenecked—or just operate at lower clocks and save some power.

But Kaveri will be built on 28nm, and its successor on 20nm. If the latter is still a quad-core CPU, it will have a lot of silicon and power to "spend" on the GPU, so we could be looking at 1024 SPs, provided the bandwidth problem is solved. Really, if you can put high-speed memory on the APU's package, the sky is the limit in terms of GPU performance. And by sky I mean power. So perhaps 50W on notebooks and 125~150W on desktops. That seems really high, but if it replaces a lower-mainstream graphics card, or whatever you want to call it, it's not unreasonable, just as long as 15~25W notebook and 45~100W desktop SKUs are still available.

[Mintmaster]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

AMD are bandwidth limited and intel are shader limited and how they both fix these issues will decide the "winner" in the end.

Well, we don't know that Intel has a more efficient memory architecture, because their lower framerates with the same total bandwidth means their controller is seeing less load. They may well run into the same problem upon increasing their GPU power (BTW, we don't know for sure that it's all shader related).

However, the monster amounts of cache in Haswell could give Intel a huge advantage when they do run into the problem. I don't know if they're doing any tile-like rendering right now, but they could cover lower resolutions with only a few tiles, and will probably have the CPU resources to spare for command list recording and replaying, provided that their geometry processing is fast enough.

[DavidC]

Originally Posted by mczak

But well intel wants to mostly ship HSW GT1/GT2 it seems beating that shouldn't be a problem.

It's almost guaranteed that even Trinity will beat Haswell's GPU in the desktop space, since there are no plans for a GT3 there. Even on mobile, the point of GT3 seems to be about perf/watt rather than pure performance.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by DavidC

Even on mobile, the point of GT3 seems to be about perf/watt rather than pure performance.

GT3 will probably still be power limited, in which case optimizing for perf/W and optimizing for perf are the same thing.

[UniversalTruth]

AMD Trinity FM2 APU Preview

_

I'm only going to post the numbers and let you come with your own conclusions.

[Psycho]

No reflection over the difference (it's a different motherboard, but..) etc though (and generally quite some weird and unexplained numbers in that review).

[jimbo75]

More RAM testing.

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/46...ds-faster-ram/

[UniversalTruth]

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb...type=1&theater

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presenta...sn&lid=1&leg=0

[ECH]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

More RAM testing.

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/46...ds-faster-ram/

In the games tested going from 1600mhz to 2133mhz provided a performance boost.

[Psycho]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

http://www.sapphiretech.com/presenta...sn&lid=1&leg=0

I don't really get point of making these highend'ish motherboards for the A-series. Enthusiasts aren't buying those cpus anyway (at least not for their main rig where they may want such a motherboard), and the rest / system builders / etc will just go with the cheapest that does the job.

[Gubbi]

Originally Posted by Psycho

I don't really get point of making these highend'ish motherboards for the A-series.

Me too.

The A-series seems like a better fit for mini ITX systems, where you can build a capable Wii-sized PC for your kids, that does reasonably well in games.

Cheers

[jimbo75]

Yes it's quite annoying actually as I can't find a mini ITX FM2 mobo anywhere.

[Alexko]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

Yes it's quite annoying actually as I can't find a mini ITX FM2 mobo anywhere.

Asrock FMS A75M-ITX
MSI FM2-A75IA-E53

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Psycho

Enthusiasts aren't buying those cpus anyway

Source, or at least explanation why you generalise it in this way.

Perhaps there are few who actually do buy them with the only idea to overclock the hell out of Trinity. No?

[jimbo75]

Originally Posted by Alexko

Asrock FMS A75M-ITX
MSI FM2-A75IA-E53

Yeah I mean there are none on sale currently, at least not in the UK. Can't see any on Newegg either.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

Yeah I mean there are none on sale currently, at least not in the UK. Can't see any on Newegg either.

You can either ask your stores in UK or motherboards manufacturers directly. Wonder if they need some delivery time, when exactly they will have products, so you can order, etc.

[jimbo75]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

You can either ask your stores in UK or motherboards manufacturers directly. Wonder if they need some delivery time, when exactly they will have products, so you can order, etc.

I actually have an account with the UK's main ASRock distributor and they don't have any in stock either. I wonder if they are still trying to run down their FM1 stock.

I emailed Scan on Tuesday and got this reply -

In regards to the motherboards, the itx are hard to source at the moment. We are slowly adding them to the website once stock is available at the suppliers.

[Lightman]

I will be getting mid-high end board for FM2 and I cluster myself as enthusiast. You can have fun tweaking and overclocking hardware even without getting best overlay performance.
Besides FM2 will get Kaveri APU next year so these motherboards will have a bit of life in them.

I agree though going for $200+ APU board is pointless, but spending $100-$130 on decent quality product with all up to date connectivity is not a bad choice for a bit of fun on AMD.

Once I get my hands on A10-5800K I'm planning on tweaking it for both minimum power as well as maximum reasonable performance for air cooled HTPC. Memory choice will be quite important as I'm hoping to hit 2400MHz+
All that in not too distant future I hope

[Malo]

The only uses I have for A-series desktop parts are HTPC's (which they are the best at) and nettops for using in conference rooms at work.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Malo

The only uses I have for A-series desktop parts are HTPC's (which they are the best at) and nettops for using in conference rooms at work.

Guys, don't be so rude. Everything is alright if pricing is the correct one. Ask for the proper price if you dislike it and then enjoy it even for more serious stuff.

WTH is HTPC by the way? /sarcaasm

[liolio]

Well I just read Ars technica review and it is less than underwhelming (by the way it looks a lot like a tech report review, they adopted the same methodology or there is partnership going on?).
For most user including gaming, the last pentium and cheap Hd6670 or Nv matching part (gtx 640?) is in the same ball park with regard to price, offers both better gaming performances and lower power consumption