At 500 watts 24/7 that would come to about $1.44 per day using average energy prices. It's not that bad.
Checking out MPC's CES2014 Vids, really impressed with Gigabyte's BRIXPro.
Only $700 + HDD/RAM (so around $850 when fully built)!
Unless you absolutely need your system to be as small as possible there is little reason to spend the price premium over a more conventional mini-itx build that will get you a lot more bang for you buck for a moderate increase in size. Or if like shonumi you're afraid that you'll somehow fuck up a custom build (which still makes no sense to me).
I forgot to thank NV for telling me not to buy Kaveri. I hope drivers will help speed the gpu up for the people who bought them. If they were back at $150 msrp and the prices dropped I would think about buying one for testing but right now they just suck in performance and price. I hope AMD's armv8 CPU's won't be the same. (If they mess up arm they just need to fully invest in their GPU's and make some dedicated to Bitcoin/Litecoin/Dogecoin etc since all of their good gaming cards except the r9-270x have risen in price by $100-$150.)
Your a guinea pig if you buy Kaveri right now. So that is probably a good choice. I hope Mantle and maybe HSA/HUMA takes off, but im not entirely sure how well that will end for AMD. I just hope their revenue from supplying chips to current consoles will help them out enough to at least get some decent CPU's out. I'd prefer if Intel wasn't the only x86 CPU manufacturer out there.
For the record their problems with kaveri have little to do with the architecture itself (although that is still inferior to haswell). They got screwed over by the whole global foundries fiasco and are now far behind in manufacturing technology. Intel can cram twice as many transistors into the same size chip with the same power consumption. Which gives them a big advantage. Combine that with such a high transistor count and the cost to produce these new APUs is going to be quite high. If global foundries and TSMC don't catch up to Intel somehow things will only get worse in the future for AMD. And because of how photolithographic manufacturing technology tends to develop in a leap frog fashion that is unlikely to ever happen.
The other issue is with memory bandwidth. Dual channel DDR3 is not fast enough to keep up with a strong IGP. Intel fixed this with Iris pro by adding 128MB of edram on package which acts as a super fast cache. And this is why it's so much faster despite the GPU part itself having similar processing capabilities. Moving to quad channel DDR3 would require larger more expensive motherboards and a new socket architecture. Which AMD does not want to do. Adding edram like Intel would make the package too damn big and expensive with their already huge chip. And might require a socket change due to the package size. The PS4 APU used GDDR5 memory to get around this. But since GDDR5 isn't a standard memory made for desktop motherboards AMD can't do that here. Even if they did introduce a new DIMM socket for it on desktop motherboards and get desktop memory module manufacturers to begin production it would take years for production to scale up and costs to come down with them as the only company using it. And by then DDR4 would be common. So AMD is stuck waiting for DDR4. They could try shrinking the cpu portion of the chip to make room for edram but without a competitive manufacturing process that can't be done without producing chips with abysmal cpu performance that nobody would use.
I expected GPU performance gains to be fairly minimal. Although maybe not quite as minimal as they turned out to be. But the cpu performance actually surprised me. It seems steamroller is not as efficient as they had promised. Not good. Not good at all. I expected it to at least catch up to sandy bridge. Now they're 4 years behind in cpu side performance.
As far as the consoles go thorhian they aren't making much money off of those. They don't manufacture the chips and their royalties for the design are low. That's how they managed to land the contracts in the first place.
(01-17-2014, 10:24 AM)ThorhiantheUltimate Wrote: [ -> ]I'd prefer if Intel wasn't the only x86 CPU manufacturer out there.
I don't think VIA is going anywhere, but their license expires in 2018.
Yeah, I had a bad feeling about the whole global foundries situation. Also, Lamedude, where can I buy VIA products that would perform on the level of even AMD CPU's, let alone closer to Intel? Looking at their products, none of them seem to be at a level of performance of either AMD or Intel (but they seem pretty keen on green/ low power consumption). Their Quad Core X86-64 CPU is on a 40nm process, which is even bigger than AMD's process at global foundries.
Unless some sort of miracle happens, this is probably going to get ugly for AMD, and for consumers as well. Mantle and huma adoption (and their fairly decent GFX cards, which are caught up in a mining frenzy) seem to be their only routes current recovery (and for Global foundries to improve their process).
Oops, almost forgot, thanks for the Info NV
Mantle is able to be used by Nvidia and Intel due to it not having specific code for GCN. If they get their hands on Mantle, AMD will either have the best implementation or be left in the dust
@ThorhiantheUltimate - I see VIA a lot in the embedded market. I guess they tried to go for low-end mini-pcs at one point, but Intel, AMD, and various ARM licensees have rooted them out for the most part. I dunno what they do to turn a profit making x86 CPUs (if they do profit, that is). AMD CPUs will probably beat anything VIA makes no matter what category you're looking at, but that's just a guess based on my not having looked at any solid data, so take it with a grain of salt.