AMD Kaveri Review: A8-7600 and A10-7850K Tested
by Ian Cutress & Rahul Garg on January 14, 2014 8:00 AM ESTTrueAudio
As part of the Kaveri package, AMD is also focusing on adding and updating their fixed function units / accelerators. Due to the jump on the GPU side to GCN we now have the TrueAudio DSP to allow developers to increase the audio capabilities in game, and both the Video Codec Engine (VCE) and Unified Video Decoder (UVD) have been updated.
All the major GPU manufacturers on the desktop side (AMD, NVIDIA, Intel) are pushing new technologies to help improve the experience of owning one of their products. There are clearly many ways to approach this – gaming, compute, content consumption, low power, high performance and so on. This is why we have seen feature like FreeSync, G-Sync, QuickSync, OpenCL adoption and the like become part of the fold in terms of these graphics solutions.
AMD’s new feature is TrueAudio - a fully programmable dedicated hardware element to offload audio tasks to.
The main problem with developing new tools comes down to whether they should be implemented in a general fashion or with a dedicated element. This comes down to the distinction of having a CPU or an ASIC do the work – if the type of work is specific and never changes, then an ASIC makes sense due to its small size, low power overhead and high throughput. A CPU wins out when the work is not clearly defined and it might change, so it opens up the realm of flexibility in exchange for performance per watt.
CPUs are now significantly powerful that a range of audio based techniques are available to them and the algorithms are optimized. The only limitation in this regard is the imagination of the developer or audio artist, which actually becomes part of the problem. When implementing an audio filter on the fly to a video game, the processing via the CPU can be overly taxing, especially when the effect is persistent over a long time. The example AMD gave in their press slide deck is one of adding reverb to an audio sample. The longer the reverb, the bigger the draw on CPU resources:
AMD cites this CPU usage as the effect of one filter on one audio sample. Imagine being in a firefight situation in a video game, whereby there are many people running around with multiple gunshots, splatter audio and explosions occurring. Implementing effects on all, and then transposing audio location to the position of the character is actually computationally expensive, all for the sake of realism. This is where the TrueAudio unit comes into play – the purpose is to offload all of this onto a dedicated bit of silicon that has the pathways built in for quicker calculations.
TrueAudio is also implemented on AMD's latest-generation R9 260 and R9 290 video cards – basically anything at least GCN 1.1 and up. Meanwhile we also know that the PS4’s audio DSP is based on TrueAudio, though given the insular nature of console development it's not clear whether the APIs are also the same on both platforms. AMD for their part is working with major audio middleware plugins (wwise, Bink) in order to help develop the TrueAudio ecosystem, so even in the case where the APIs are dissimilar, middleware developers can abstract that and focus on the similarities in the hardware underneath.
As is usually the case for these additional hardware features, games will need to specifically be coded to use TrueAudio, and as such the benefits of TrueAudio will be game specific. At the same time there are not any games currently on the market that can take advantage of the feature, so the hardware is arriving before there is software ready to use it. The first three games on AMD's list that will support TrueAudio are Murdered: Soul Suspect, Thief, and Lichdom. Much like FreeSync, I expect the proof is in the pudding and we will have to wait to see how it can affect the immersion factor of these titles.
Unified Video Decoder and Video Codec Engine
I wanted to include some talk about the UVD and VCE with Kaveri as both are updated – we get UVD 4, an update to error resiliency for H.264, and VCE 2, as shown below:
Of the two blocks, the improved VCE has the more interesting improvements to discuss. With the addition of support for B frames in H.264 encoding, the resulting ability to do backwards frame prediction should help improve the resulting image quality from VCE and/or reduce the required bitrates for any given quality level. Meanwhile the addition of support for the higher quality YUV444 color space in the H.264 encoder should help with the compression of primarily linear lineart/text, which in turn is important for the clarity of wireless displays.
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nader_21007 - Saturday, January 18, 2014 - link
Can you show me what improvement haswell did over previous gen? TDP going from 77W to 84W, meanwhile performance droped in most cases. Can't you see the charts in this review?Principle - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Andrew, that depends based on size, budget, etc...and I own an AMD Piledriver CPU and could never tell you when it was supposedly slower, maybe a game takes a couple seconds longer to load, but after that its all the same.And I have used Intel CPUs too, and have hiccups and lag multitasking with them in real life, that never happens on my AMD systems. If you get an i5 and an AMD GPU, that would be great and last with the GPU compute advantage of AMD GPUs and the Mantle potential.
These Kaveri have a lot of value at launch for the entertainment center PCs, or ITX platforms because at 65W or even 45W it delivers a lot of performance in one chip that you can keep cool and quiet in a small package. Also good for all in one PCs built into the monitor. Not for the avid gamer right now, but a little more future proof than an Intel CPU in my opinion.
ImSpartacus - Thursday, January 16, 2014 - link
If you're not gaming, is it really that hard to "future-proof" your CPU?I feel like most low end CPUs will perform "basic" non-gaming tasks for many years to come.
andrewaggb - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
To be clear, I'd get an i5 quad core with a 260x or 270x. I realize they aren't at all in the same price range, but it's good performance per dollar.I was expecting Kavari to have 10% better cpu performance and 25% better gpu performance. This has equal cpu performance and essentially equal gpu performance. It has other improvements, but that's a serious dissappointment on the performance side of things.
I've already got 3 i5 quad cores with a 6870, 7850, and 270x in each and I'm happy with them. Just though Kaveri might be good enough, and it is for older stuff and minecraft and whatnot.
But it seems like yet another year that paying the extra money and having some longevity is going to be the right move.
Quite frankly my oldest system, the i5 750 with a 6870 would mop the floor with kaveri in everything but power consumption.
yankeeDDL - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
You're kidding right?It practically doubled the performance per watt of Richland (45W Kaveri almost always outpaces 100W Richland) and that's disappointing?
It's true that Richland was way behind, but the improvement is massive.
There's still a glaring gap with Intel's CPU, but it is smaller.
Just as much as the glaring gap on the GPU side (but this time on AMD's favor) got wider.
HSA is the key for AMD to push the GPU advantage over to the CPU to compensate. If it works, then Kaveri will be really up to, or better of the core I5 which cost more than 2X ... "IF" ...
Jaybus - Thursday, January 16, 2014 - link
I'm not convinced HSA is the future. It is a diminishing returns issue. The only difference between HSA and SMP is different types of cores are being used. The bus arbitration and coherency issues are exactly the same. Neither is scalable to dozens of cores, let alone hundreds. HSA has the same limitations as SMP. Something like Knights Corner's ring bus and message passing is more likely the future. Near term, there is an advantage to HSA. Long term will rely on a much faster chip-to-chip interconnect to transfers and segmented memory to avoid the arbitration and coherency issues. CMOS silicon photonics maybe. That would enable optical busses orders of magnitude faster than PCIe, or in fact much faster than any chip-to-chip electronic bus, and that would make something like Knights Corner's ring bus the future path to high core counts.jimjamjamie - Thursday, January 16, 2014 - link
A genuinely interesting and insightful comment, thanks.artk2219 - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Until you play a game that uses more than 2 threads, or have tasks running in the background while gaming, then you'll wish you had those two extra threads. Seriously I wish people would quite trying to recommend dual cores for gaming or even general use, unless its in a machine for the type of person that only does one or two things thing at a time. Dual cores are showing their age now, its only going to be worse a year or two from now. Also why would you spend 90 on a Pentium dual core when you could spend 80 on an Athlon 750k or that same 90 on a 760k. They have similar single thread performance and stomp the g2120 in multithreaded situations, plus they're unlocked so you can overclock to your hearts content. Im not saying that Kaveri isn't overpriced right now, they could stand to drop 20 dollars for the top two chips and 10 for the last chip reviewed. But they just launched and those prices will change, and in the end its easier to point people to one part for all of their needs than it is to point them to two.http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...
Nagorak - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
The Intel processors are more energy efficient. That's one reason.artk2219 - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
Fair enough, but its a negligible difference once you factor in the discrete GPU that you would be pairing it with anyways. Cooling it shouldn't be anymore of a problem than cooling the same setup with the DGPU, granted there aren't really any fm2+ itx boards so that may be a problem if you're going for a tiny size, but thats about it.