It’s that time of the week when we take a nostalgic look at a point in the past which still resonates. Today we not going back too far in time, revisiting a point just three years ago when many of us where trying our best to get excited about AMD’s Kaveri platform chips which were launched in Taipei back in January 2014. It’s a story that certainly does resonate today as we edge closer to the launch of AMD’s highly anticipated Ryzen CPUs. Back in 2014, this is what Massman had to say:

“Those following us on social media will probably already know this, but yesterday AMD came to Taipei, Taiwan to present the new Kaveri micro-architecture. Since this was the last stop of their business trip, there's not much new to tell. From a performance perspective HSA seems to be interesting, although it's still too early to see the real effect. I enjoyed seeing references to overclocking on the marketing slides, especially highlighting the benefit of increasing the memory bandwidth. With HSA, system memory bandwidth is again a bit more important.”

“They didn't mention any early overclocking results, but during our chat behind-the-scene it became clear that AMD too was a bit underwhelmed by overclocking potential of the Kaveri APUs. Currently the maximum frequency on LN2 (internally) is about 7GHz, which is far away from the 8GHz the Richland APUs could do. From what I gather, the potential problem might be the new 28nm silicon. Because the CPU part is using a different process than the GPU part, mixing them together on one die is complicated. Early Q3 (June/July) they expect to have better yields after optimizing the process. Maybe the Kaveri refresh will bring us more overclocking joy.”

Clearly AMD had very little chance of rivaling Intel with its Kaveri APUs, especially in the area of Overclocking. All indications suggest however, that its new Zen architecture could put them back in the game. Fingers crossed. Catch the full article from January 11th 2014 here.