After some humming and hawing to the press in the last little whilst AMD have finally outlined the release date for the Kaveri APU. ZDNet are stating that desktop variants of the APU will ship early next year, whilst mobile processors will appear in the first half of 2014. And anticipated release date of Q4-2013 appeared on previous slides but the combination of a depressed market and engineering challenges may well have pushed the launch out further than intended.

Kaveri is the more power-hungry mainstream/desktop variant of the Kabini APU released earlier this year and features both Steamroller CPU and GCN graphics architectures built on a 28nm process. It will incorporate between two and four Steamroller cores and a variable number of GCN shaders depending on model. AMD refer to them as the 3rd-generation A-Series APU, and they effectively replace the Richland APUs of the FM2 platform.

Kaveri APUs are designed for the newly minted FM2+ platform which has slowly been appearing over the last few weeks. In theory it will be possible to purchase an FM2+ system including Richland APU and be Kaveri-ready come launch, but in reality it may be more cost-effective to hold off for now.

The APUs are due to be the first to adhere to AMD's Unified Memory Architecture, which in tern is believed to be an important part of the next generation of games consoles appearing later this year. As such it will include support for Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) applications, a major part of their long-term plans in the PC-space.

More information on HSA can be found here

Source: ZDNET