This note describes the new AMD APU to be released in 2014-Q1 for Compucon Thunderbird and what is special about it.  Information on this new APU came from various web sources. 

2011  FM1 A8-3850 4C 2.9Ghz 4MB CPU, Radeon 6550D 400C 600Mhz 
2012  FM2 A10-5800K 4C 3.8Ghz 4MB CPU, Radeon 7660D 384C 800Mhz
2013  FM2 A10-6800K 4C 4.1Ghz 4MB CPU, Radeon 8670D 384C 844Mhz
2014  FM2+ A10-7850K 4C 3.7Ghz 4MB CPU, Radeon R7  8C 720Mhz

• The FM2+ Socket on the motherboard can take FM2 or FM2+ APU, but FM2 Socket on the motherboard cannot take FM2+ APU.  This situation is called Backward Compatible.

• Take note of the type and number of Radeon cores in the latest APU.  This APU has 8 Radeon R7 GPU cores instead of a few hundred shader cores as in previous generations.

Special Features of New APU • It is the first APU to implement Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) within an APU.  There are 2 important features that turn the CPU and GPU in the APU to operate in the fashion prescribed by HSA. Unified Memory Access (hUMA) Unified Queuing (hQ) • AMD has provided a performance figure of 856 GFLOPS for A10-7850K.  Computing resources are 4 cores of CPU and 8 cores of GPU.  The CPU runs at 3.7GHz and the GPU runs at 720MHz.   Together, the APU has a TDP of 95W.   For the first time, AMD pitched this APU against Intel Core i5-4670K and not Core i3 as done previously.  This signifies the confidence of performance AMD has in this new APU. • AMD has mentioned that the 8 GPU cores take up as much as 47% of the real estate of the APU, and this is higher than 31% in the case of Intel Haswell CPU.

Real Colour in GPGPU

• Applications taking advantage of hQ and hUMA will take time to reach the market.  Applications have to be compiled with HSA-aware compilers although AMD may want to implement HSA at a microscopic level transparent to applications.  A website (Extremetech) has shown a performance gain of 12 times over a single CPU thread for NBody which is a computing intensive application. The website shows up to 16384 Bodies.  Compucon TSD has done tests for up to 1 million Bodies with Nvidia GTX660 960 Kepler CUDA cores.  This indicates the relative positioning of the APU.

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