con635 :
babachicken :
AMD has been recently going into the world of APUS, and ive heard they will be staying that way, and not going back to FX CPUs.
is this true?
There could well be an fx apu, even intel hasn't improved massively since sandy bridge on the cpu side, the future seems to be apus with gpu assisted software. That's where we'll see the next big jump in benchmark and software performance, lets also see what the game makers do with the ps4, it has an x86/gcn apu with huma.
People recommend (I thought the same) the fx8xxx as future proof because of the 8 cpu cores and the ps4 having 8 cpu cores as that would mean games get better threaded but that was possible with mantlle alone and dx12 soon. The ps4 uses the 8 cores for multi tasking eg 2 for the os and I now think amd were trying with the ps4 to get developers to use hsa not the many x86 cores. So if you wanted to *gamble* on future proof imo an apu like kaveri/carizzo with hsa/huma would be a cheap bet.
1) The FM2+ socket has both APU's and CPU's that are the same thing without the graphics. The X4-760K for example is fairly cheap and makes the most sense with a dedicated graphics card like the GTX750Ti (or R9-270X if you want Mantle support which helps reduce the CPU bottleneck).
2) You're a little confused on HSA and the x86 cores... The PS4 and XBOX ONE have six of the eight cores used for a game. They are ALWAYS used by a game, as is the GPU.
HSA has to do with the Shared Memory. http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/what-is-heterogeneous-system-architecture-hsa/
So developers will learn how to code better to make Shared Memory work properly but ideally they are fully using all the processing power that the six x86 cores, and the GPU provide as well. The Shared System Memory just stores the data that the CPU and GPU process. There's a LOT devs can do however to be more efficient about it but game engines are complicated so it will take a few years until we really see massive changes.
3) "Gamble on an APU"
An APU is a GPU and CPU combined but if it's massively underpowered there's only so much you can do.
a) The GPU portion uses some of the System RAM. They tested the fastest APU to date and it was still getting bottlenecked at 2400MHz Dual-Channel so the GPU was waiting to talk to the slower DDR3 memory. For comparison, top-end cards use about 7000MHz of VRAM I believe. (What's worse is some people bought top-end APU's and have a single stick of 1333MHz DDR3 memory which is the same as 667MHz in Dual-Channel).
b) Windows games won't be exploiting Shared Memory any time soon for gaming like the PS4 is capable of, especially with APU's being relatively underpowered which they will remain for a long time. Look at how large a top-end AMD graphics card is to cool the GPU and Video RAM. Plus, again the System RAM bottleneck so APU's can't go beyond that bottleneck.
So Windows games will continue to be coded without Shared Memory.
(It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Nobody will code for a high-end Shared Memory PC until it exists in a high enough percentage, and nobody will make one until there's a definite need for one. This also includes Operating System support.)
Other:
What we will LIKELY see in the near future is DirectX games start to employ "Shared Tile Resources" which hold a lot of texture data and efficiently stream this to the graphics card. Microsoft did a demo of this zooming into a planet (Mars?) so when you highlighted a certain spot a lot of data was copied into Video RAM, and as you zoomed in it would anticipate and buffer the most likely next data you'd use.
The reason for Shared Tile Resources of course is because System RAM is cheaper. So if these and other methods such as Tessellation mitigate the need to make the big commitment in hardware and software to make the switch it's going to be quite a while.
So never?
A Shared System Memory PC will happen, possibly at the low-end first like the consoles but it likely won't be mainstream for quite a while.
I may be proven completely wrong though. I have limited programming skills. I think it would mainly depend on how easy it is to implement a Shared Memory code path alongside the normal path. That's similar to having both MANTLE and DX in the same game (like BF4). Regardless, these are all things that take YEARS to accomplish so nobody should base a purchase decision on this.
Cheers.
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