lots of good stuff, and thanks chris, for the exceptional review right after ces.
the a8 7600 steals the spotlight from a10 7850k. seems like amd is aiming for high ipc, power efficient(\o/) uarch with kaveri. something i could not say before with trinity and richland. and well done amd, in that regard. kaveri still maintains best igpu performance for price over intel, and they seem to be good for 900p gaming. i woulda liked to see some 900p gaming benches since 1080p is still beyond the reach. the long-neglected video codec engine (vce) received an upgrade - finally some good news on that. presence of xdma engine in kaveri, frame pacing support for dual gfx(finally!!) even better. the last one will be really beneficial for laptops.
hsa adoption seems isv dependent. amd should dilligently push for application support to bring out kaveri's full potential. they'll also have to outperform intel's opencl perf. what's up with that anyway? is it because of the L3 cache acting as buffer? i never thought that a haswell dual core core i3 (and i5 4430/3350p to a lesser extent), which i considered overpriced before a10 7850k, 7700k were introduced, to outperform richland and kaveri in so many cpu-based and in some opencl workloads. that just feels weird.
now the bad stuff - a10 7850k, 7700k are overpriced. the standout a8 7600 has performance, power efficiency and price trifecta( as long as it holds the price) but won't launch till later. newegg and other retailers are charging rather high price for top kaveri apus, i saw 7850k selling for $190 and 7700k for $170. for desktop cpu performance, these two just makes those overpriced haswell core i3 and i5 cpus better value (wtf, another thing i thought i'd never type). 7850k/7700k's pricing is made worse by amd's own fx6300, 6350, 8320 cpus - all selling for lower prices. both intel i3//i5 and amd's fx are better for gaming with discreet gfx cards.
where are the hsa-boosted softwares? amd should have had at least 3-5 apps ready at launch to show off hsa's promise.
mantle is m.i.a. too, but that's dice's fault. and amd's, for making mantle exclusive to dice.
the lack of raw cpu performance will cause a lot of c.a.l.f. to freak out. after all the time their !@#$ing, ranting about "real gamers and enthusiasts don't care about power consumption/efficiency"... well, amd cares about power efficiency. HAHAHA