AMD’s Kaveri APU slips again, 2014 now

18 months late so far with no end in sight

Nov 6, 2012 by

AMD ASeriesFAMILY LogoIt looks like the ever slipping AMD Kaveri chip just got another year to ripen on the proverbial vine. Unfortunately for the enthusiast, that year happens to be 2013, not 2012.

You might recall that Kaveri is the successor to the current Trinity chip, basically the next generation APU. The idea is simple enough, replace the Piledriver cores with Steamroller and replace the VLIW4 GPU with GCN, then tie it all together with a new uncore. The short story is that it is a generational advance on APU roadmap. The unfortunate part is that Intel’s Haswell chip is far more than a generational advance.

Between Haswell’s graphics capabilities and their power savings potential, it likely became clear that Kaveri wasn’t aiming for the right ballpark. Between AMD’s self-inflicted wounds…. errrr…. roadmap delays and a reevaluation of the competitive landscape, Kaveri kept slipping. What was meant to ship about now became a 1H/2013 product, and as early as last July, SemiAccurate moles were bringing up the dreaded R word.

Yes, Kaveri was being “reevaluated” back then, ostensibly to make it into something more competitive against Haswell. Pushing out a chip to tweak it like this is almost always a losing game, but if done well, it can have better results than the original plan. Ostensibly, that was the situation with Kaveri, and as of summer 2012, it was still in a great deal of flux. That said, it was unquestionably not a 1H/2013 product at that time, the ‘Richland’ update to Trinity had already taken it’s place.

More recently, SemiAccurate’s moles have come back and said that Kaveri has slipped yet again to 2014 if it is still alive. Big if. That would put the chip 18 months late best case, and then you have to ask yourself why not just skip it? Time will tell what happens, but one thing that is not in question is if there will be an updated APU in 2013. That answer is definitely no, Intel has the game all to itself next year.S|A

The following two tabs change content below.
My Twitter profileMy Google+ profileMy LinkedIn profile

Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate