Kaveri APU prototype pictured and leaked by Frostbite’s Technical Director

Johan Andersson, Technical Director on Frostbite engine by DICE has shared the following picture where it seems that he got one early prototype of AMD’s Kaveri APU.

There have been some rumours circling around that AMD has already started to ship Kaveri APU development units to certain interested parties that they’re associated or in partnership with. This photograph confirms these rumours. One could speculate that rest of the Gaming Evolved partners already got their hands on these for initial testing, but as of now there are no specific details.

While its not a big secret that chipset and system manufacturers send a series of prototypes to a handful of preferred software and hardware developers, the desktop version of Kaveri APUs are expected to arrive by November 2013. Although the hardware doesn’t entirely give an idea about the end product and it wouldn’t be surprising if the hardware contained a series of bugs and flaws that software/hardware developers may find make the chip difficult to work with at first.

Judging by the photos, one could speculate if Kaveri APUs for desktops would most likely have a shared GDDR5 memory embedded on the system itself as no DIMM slots can be seen on the prototype’s motherboard. If so, those game and software developers who have worked with PlayStation 4 earlier to design the games may find certain familiarization with AMD’s Kaveri APU prototype. Question now remains however is to know how good the implementation would be on the PC.

According to reports, this will surely make it easier for developers to work on the AMD’s hardware for PC developing environments for software, therefore utilizing the capability and information that they’ve got from working with PlayStation 4. One thing for certain is that if AMD is able to push APU development in this direction, the day is not very far away where we will see production of low-end/ low-profile graphic cards to be ceased, maybe.

Source: Prohardver