AMD Kaveri APU Could Have 832 Shaders And 13 Compute Units

German site Planet3DNow reports that an upcoming Kaveri Spectre desktop APU could have as many as 832 shaders and 13 compute units. If this were to be the case it would mean the best Kaveri APU has much better GPU performance than expected – indeed the flagship was expected to have only 6 Compute units and 384 shaders like a HD 7730 has. With 13 compute units and 832 shaders the next AMD APU is more akin to somewhere in between a HD 7770 and HD 7790.

The benchmarks reveal that the new Kaveri Spectre APU has dramatically improved performance when compared to Richland – notably in the way of both GPU performance and memory bandwidth – seen below (courtesy of WCCFTech).

GP Processing:

• AMD Kaveri APU R5 M200 @600 MHz (DDR3-1600) – 709.6 MPix/s
• AMD Richland APU HD 8670D @844 MHz (DDR3-2133) – 239.3 MPix/s

Memory Bandwidth:

• AMD Kaveri APU R5 M200 @600 MHz (DDR3-1600) – 15.0 GB/s
• AMD Richland APU HD 8670D @844 MHz (DDR3-2133) – 12.4 GB/s

GP Cryptography:

• AMD Kaveri APU R5 M200 @600 MHz (DDR3-1600) – 9.4 GB/s
• AMD Richland APU HD 8670D @844 MHz (DDR3-2133) – 3.8 GB/s

These improvements in performance are largely attributable to the new AMD HUMA (heterogeneous unified memory architecture) implementation on Kaveri though Planet3DNow points out that is important to consider these unexpectedly high results could be from Hybrid CrossFire. The reason why the additional shaders appear as part of the APU, despite being on a separate card in Hybrid CrossFire, could be because the AMD HUMA implementation causes this. Indeed jumping from 384 to 832 shaders does seem like an unrealistic jump for the Kaveri APUs to take as that’s nearly doubling the GPU power of what was expected. Though if these shaders are indeed part of the APU then Kaveri could be a real game changer.

Images courtesy of Planet3DNow!