In addition to having an improved Steamroller CPU core and Radeon series 7 GPU cores (Graphic’s Core Next) the new Kaveris will also be the first CPUs using AMD’s much talking about HAS (Heterogeneous System Architecture) design. This new design philosophy is intended to make the CPU cores and GPU cores work more efficiently together. When this new design is properly combined with APIs like OpenCL they can theoretically achieve much better performance results because it is easier to offload the workloads from the CPU to the GPU cores.

AMD has, in the past, been reluctant to make direct performance comparisons due to some inefficiencies in their CPU designs. Most notable of these is very poor memory and caching performance. These two items have hurt AMD for a while and in some cases have forced them to reduce the amount of cache in their CPUs to avoid even larger problems. Now AMD is claiming that they have corrected these (and other) performance problems making Kaveri ready to jump back into the fray.

It is entirely possible that the new 12 Compute core (4 general purpose and 8 GPU) APU with its 818 Gigaflop performance could challenge Intel, if the claim holds up. This would not be the first time that AMD has made some impressive claims only to have them fall short in the real world. We hope that these claims are true for AMD’s sake and also for future competition. After all, if AMD can really challenge Intel, that just means better and faster CPUs for the consumer.

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