The GPU In the APU

The GPU In the APU

AMD moved towards the Radeon 7000 series architecture for Kabani, and as such they have a very strong offering as it is GCN based and in essence the same architecture that you see in say the Seres 7000 GPUs (Radeon 7800/7900/260/270/280/290) instead of the previously used VLIW design.

GCN-based GPU cores

• Up to 128 shaders
• Up to 600 MHz
• 8xAA and 16xAF Support
• DirectX11.2 Support
• AMD Eyefinity Technology2 and 4K Ultra HD Support
• DisplayPort 1.2 Support
   

The APUs make use of the Radeon GCN (Graphics Core Next 2.0) architecture. So next to the four CPU cores, you now will spot two GCN based GPU cores as well and that results into 128 shader processors (64 cores per GCN Core cluster) and that's where AMD is making the difference opposed to its competition. Basically they compensate with a very powerful graphics engine harbored inside that APU. The performance is okay, the shared L2 cache definitely helps out here, but a bottleneck remains graphics memory which is drawn from System Memory, hence for systems with Kaveri APUs faster memory will result into better graphics performance.

Unified Video Decoder & Video Compression Engine

Kabani supports hardware decoding of H.264 and VC-1 video codec standards. The chip also has built-in support for video encoding for H.264 via its video compression engine.

• Dedicated hardware to offload video encoding/decoding from CPU
• AMD Picture Perfect support with HD Post-Processing technologies

The AMD APUs adds some new high quality video post processing features to improve video. This includes new super- resolution upscaling that can improve how SD quality video looks on HD screens, as well as how 1080P content looks on Ultra HD screens. The IGP will provide support for multiple monitors and all common connectors are supported including HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort and DSUB (VGA).

So Do You Need A New Motherboard?

Yes. the AMD AM1 APU platform launches with AMDs AM1 chipsets on the socket FS1b motherboards. these offer:

• PCI Express 2.0 x16 (4 lanes assigned).
• AMD Memory  support for up to DDR3-1600MHz (Single Channel)
• 2x USB 3.0 and 8x USB 2.0
• 2x SATA 2/3 (6Gbps)
• 1x Gigabit Ethernet controller