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ROGBot
A few articles of news I thought some of you guys may be interested in hearing about
Kaveri Delays AGAIN!!!
http://www.amdoverclock.net/why-its-a-big-deal-amd-is-delaying-kaveri/
"The PS4′s “Big Challenge” is its AMD Chip that “Heavily Relies on Multi-Threading,” Says Planetside 2 Dev"
http://www.amdoverclock.net/the-ps4%E2%80%B2s-big-challenge-is-its-amd-chip-that-heavily-relies-on-m...
"AMD Never Settle Bundle gets Updated"
http://www.amdoverclock.net/amd-never-settle-game-bundle-gets-updated/
Kaveri Delays AGAIN!!!
http://www.amdoverclock.net/why-its-a-big-deal-amd-is-delaying-kaveri/
“We’ve been sampling parts to customers over the last several months, and we will begin shipping Kaveri in 2013, towards the end of the year,” was how Lisa Su, AMD’s senior face at Computex, concluded her keynote.
Su had just finished the first public demonstration of Kaveri, with the chip powering a demo of a level of the hack-and-slash game Devil May Cry.
This wasn’t necessarily new information for the tech enthusiast and investor crowd. Days before, AMD had updated its investor relations portal with a roadmap that put Kaveri’s launch somewhere in the last quarter of 2013.
So, coming out of Computex the message to the public from AMD was Kaveri in 2013. Full stop.
But behind closed doors this wasn’t necessarily the case.
In late July VR-Zone obtained a series of documents given to OEMs by AMD behind closed doors (the document we obtained is heavily watermarked so we can’t post it publicly). This document says that engineering samples of Kaveri won’t be ready until August, production candidate samples will go out in October and initial production will begin in December. The target launch into channel is now mid-February 2014 meaning that consumers will be able to buy the chip until the spring.
Interestingly the document also made it clears the days of the big core are numbered, leaving the FX-9590 as the final legacy of the FX line.
Roy Taylor, AMD’s VP of channel sales, had a confusing answer when asked about Kaveri’s delays. He claimed that AMD never said the launch would be before Christmas, and the chip would be available shortly after its formal launch at CES. He chalked up delays to HSA’s marketing not yet being complete, saying the architecture itself was ready to go.
AMD’s Taiwan PR office did not respond to inquiries, instead forwarding them to press department at the company’s headquarters. PR at AMD’s HQ has not yet responded, and this post will be updated with an answer if they do.
This isn’t Kaveri’s first delay. By all accounts, the chip was supposed to be out by now but it was a no-show on the market after this year’s CES. Richland, which is overclocked Trinity by any other name, is now the stopgap to push the company through 2013.
AMD saying one thing to the press and another thing to OEM partners behind closed doors is not a tactic a company trying to win back confidence of investors should be engaging in. Investor newsletters and analysts had many favorable things to say about AMD as the company racked up wins with its APUs and got its intellectual property into the next-generation of game consoles.
Paper launches, product delays and not being truthful with investors can quickly erode confidence that was earned through design wins. At Computex, Intel’s big keynote was an admission that it was late to the APU game and was now playing catchup. In the David and Goliath narrative that has perpetually been AMD vs. Intel, this has the making of a well formed rock about to be flung.
Kaveri’s delay is a big deal not because the chip will be revolutionary upon launch — try asking a developer how to code effectively in hUMA as extracting parallelism in existing code is hard — but because it shows that AMD hasn’t outgrown its former self. CEO Rory Read has done some amazing things reforming the company, but it looks like you can’t un-teach an old dog its usual tricks.
"The PS4′s “Big Challenge” is its AMD Chip that “Heavily Relies on Multi-Threading,” Says Planetside 2 Dev"
http://www.amdoverclock.net/the-ps4%E2%80%B2s-big-challenge-is-its-amd-chip-that-heavily-relies-on-m...
PlanetSide 2 from Sony Online Entertainment is just one of many F2P/MMOtitles currently announced for the PlayStation 4. Something that has been widely requested from all of these games that are already available on PC is Cross Platform play between the PS4 and PC, but unfortunately, that won’t be happening in PlanetSide 2.
Matt Higby, Creative Director on PlanetSide 2, explained the reasoning behind this to Eurogamer by saying, “because of the update cadence, and the additional steps you have to go through to be able to release an update on the PlayStation network, we’re not going to be able to keep our servers in sync, so you won’t be able to just play with the same people.” On the bright side, they are looking at being able to transfer your character from PC to PS4 or PS4 to PC, but that has yet to be confirmed.
When it comes to actually getting the game up and running on PS4, as opposed to PC, Matt talked about how “the PS4 is a lot easier because you have a consistent set of hardware that you’re optimizing against. It really is a challenge to optimize high-end PC games to be able to work on the pantheon of hardware that’s available to players nowadays, it’s just insane.”
Higby went on to say that while the PS4 “is a much more consistent, stable platform for us to be able to develop for… the big challenge with the PS4 is its AMD chip, and it really, heavily relies on multi-threading.” Be warned, it’s about to get technical:
We have the exact same kind of Achilles’ heel on the PC too. People who have AMD chips have a disadvantage, because a single core on an AMD chip doesn’t really have as much horsepower and they really require you to kind of spread the load out across multiple cores to be able to take full advantage of the AMD processors.
Our engine sucks at that right now. We are multi-threaded, but the primary gameplay thread is very expensive. The biggest piece of engineering work that they’re doing right now, and it’s an enormous effort, is to go back through the engine and re-optimize it to be really, truly multi-threaded and break the gameplay thread up. That’s a very challenging thing to do because we’re doing a lot of stuff – tracking all these different players, all of their movements, all the projectiles, all the physics they’re doing.
It’s very challenging to split those really closely connected pieces of functionality across in multiple threads. So it’s a big engineering task for them to do, but thankfully once they do it, AMD players who’ve been having sub-par performance on the PC will suddenly get a massive boost – just because of being able to take the engine and re-implement it as multi-threaded.
I’m very excited about that because I have a lot of friends, lots of people who are more budget minded, going for AMD processors because nine times out of ten they give a lot of bang for the buck. Where it really breaks down is on games with one really big thread. PlanetSide’s probably a prime example of that.
"AMD Never Settle Bundle gets Updated"
http://www.amdoverclock.net/amd-never-settle-game-bundle-gets-updated/
AMD is updating its Never Settle Game Bundle starting this month. The never settle gaming bundles give Radeon customers multiple free titles with their Radeon graphics card purchase. The AMD Never Settle Forever bundle will ship for free with Radeon HD 7000 cards and from what we heard will include some or all of the following: Splinter Cell: Blacklist, either Lost Planet 3 or Raven’s Cry (both will launch in October), Grid 2, and Company of Heroes 2.
We’re fairly sure that once the Volcanic Islands graphics line (Radeon HD 9000) is released these will get a Never Settle bundle too with titles like Watch Dogs, Battlefield 4, and Total War: Rome 2.
