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While we know, for sure, that no one at AMD will comment on future products, we could see from Nic's real world examples how the world of tomorrow is likely to stack up for the APU.
“With business applications like LibreOffice, you can toggle Kaveri's calculation acceleration on and off”, said Nic. “The difference in performance from CPU only to GPU acceleration via HSA is 700%”.
So what about game performance?
When KitGuru Labs first tested the world's first APU in January 2011, we were impressed that it could run some modern games at 720. Sure, you had to play with settings, but this represented a big improvement over previous products.
Now, according to Nic, the top level Kaveri processors will be able to handle games like Battlefield 4 and Bioshock Infinite at 1080p.
“You will need to adjust settings for image quality”, he told us, “But we have pushed hard to make sure that a broad cross section of games will run at native resolution on an HD screen”.
Our last question of the day centred on Mantle. What benefits would it bring with AMD's Kaveri technology?
“Mantle was engineered to minimize the API overheard when driving a high number of draw calls. Games that are CPU-limited on current graphics APIs, are likely to see a sizeable performance improvement when ported to Mantle. For example the StarSwarm demo from our friends at Oxide Games show a performance boost in a heavily CPU-limited scene from about 8 fps in DirectX11 mode to 30 fps with Mantle on an A8-7600 Kaveri. Mantle basically allows the CPU to do much less work for equivalent results, allowing games to run as fast as the GPU allows.
Nice.
We did finish off by asking him for a quick bio and we learned that: Nic has been with AMD for 9 years and if he had his perfect day, then it would be bombing down a Pacific highway in a bright orange Lamborghini Gallardo next to his wife – with the stereo blasting out Tenacious D's ‘Tribute' Song. Strange, we were so sure that he was going to go with ‘What does the fox say?‘
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KitGuru says: We really appreciate Nic taking the time to speak with us. Forgetting the Kaveri launch for a second, the possibilities for constantly increasing ‘left brain-right brain' interaction for the CPU and GPU cores in the future seem very exciting.
Intel can start HSA using their own gpu chips which are poor but still something. They can surely create a much better memory controller and implement a scaled down eDRAM writeback cache to speed up DDR3 accesses much like the Xbox 1 did. In fact, Iris PRO already has it implemented but with 128MB which is too big and eats 20watts of power constantly. Using 32MB eDRAM is enough to make a serious bite to HSA performance they will aim at.