AMD Ships Next-Gen Fusion APUs to Developers

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has set in motion the next phase of their next-gen system development, which now sees their latest Fusion APU (Accelerated Processing Units) being shipped out to software developers. This is highly tipped to have been a move to familiarise parties such as next-gen games developers to familiarise them selves with the hardware and its also hardware that bares some resemblance, in terms of features, to next-gen consoles.

EA’s Johan Andersson was recently discussing a prototype PC board which features just a CPU and cooler, no memory and no storage, stating that the board was one of the next generation AMD APU development systems.

The question on our mind however is what chips have they shipped out, given that its quite late in the development cycle for Trinity chips, could they be shipping out either the Kaveri or Kabini hardware?

Kaveri is set to feature up to x4 Streamroller X86 core, HD7xxx / GCN (Graphics Core Next) while Kabini would feature x4 low-power Jaguar x86 cores and similar graphics hardware to Kaveri.

Since it is pretty late to send development samples of code-named Trinity or Trinity 2.0 (Richland) accelerated processing units, the board probably features either code-named Kaveri (up to four high-performance Steamroller x86 cores, AMD Radeon HD 7000/GCN graphics core) or code-named Kabini (up to four low-power Jaguar x86 cores, AMD Radeon HD 7000/GCN graphics core) chips. Eitherway they’re booth shaping up to be interesting solutions and it will be interesting to see how they’re integrated over the coming months.