AMD Kaveri APUs Compatible With Socket FM2+ – New Roadmap Confirms Launch in Late 2013

AMD is preparing a new socket known as “FM2+” for their upcoming generation of Kaveri APUs as revealed in a roadmap leaked by Computerbase.
The new roadmap shows that AMD would launch their Kaveri APUs in late
2013 which would bring an updated CPU and GPU architecture to the APU
platform.

AMD would introduce Kaveri APUs a few months after the launch of
their Richland APU platform which would be launched in the upcoming week
of June. While Richland would be a minor update over Trinity bringing nothing as new other than faster clock speeds, etc, Kaveri APUs would bring a totally new CPU and GPU architecture to the APU platform.

AMD’s Kaveri APUs would be the first to feature the company’s 28nm Steamroller
architecture which brings higher IPC performance and new instruction
set for the masses. The Steamroller architecture would also be featured
in AMD’s future FX processors platform but not much details are
available on that. In addition to the Steamroller architecture, Kaveri
APUs would also feature a complete GCN core for IGP which would replace
the much older VLIW architecture used on Richland and Trinity
processors. The GCN core would be supposedly based on the refined “Sea
Islands” version of the graphics chip bringing improved performance and
giving AMD a huge lead over Intel’s Iris and Iris Pro graphics chip
which would ship with their Haswell processors.

The switch from FM2 to FM2+ for Kaveri APUs was expected for a while
now. The main reason behind this switch could be the fact that AMD is
aiming to bring GDDR5/DDR4 memory
to the platform as revealed earlier. While it is still just a rumor, it
may infact be true. Talking specifically about the Kaveri SKUs, we are
looking at 2-4 core modules which would ship with 6-12 GCN compute
units. So performance around the Radeon HD 7790 is pretty much expected
from the upcoming chips. While the architecture change sounds great, the
most important thing about the Kaveri APUs platform is the HSA
foundation built around it and the recently detailed HUMA architectur
which would allow the CPU and GPU to communicate more efficiently in a
unified manner, similar to what’s being done on the PlayStation 4. With
such improvements, features and technologies, AMD’s Kaveri APU platform
is sure to become a great hit. Expect more details soon.