AMD Console APUs

Jaguar cores are not as powerful as Steamroller cores, and why do you feel the desktop version isn't as powerful?

The software on consoles is more than likely running lighter in the graphics department, to keep frame rates where developers are targeting.

Jaguar cores are less powerful than Llano / Trinity / Richland / Kaveri APUs which are in turn less powerful than Bulldozer / Piledriver CPUs.

The main benefit of Jaguar APUs is the low power consumption along side relatively decent performance. This actually makes them a good choice for economical laptops. AMD intent was for Jaguar APU (Kabini / Temash) to be used in tablets when they were released back in May 2013, but they did not have any design wins. Apparently, the performance and power consumption were not good enough for any of the tablet manufacturers to consider switching from ARM processors to Jaguar APUs.

I'm a PC gamer, I have an A10 7850k APU...and I can tell you that the Jaguar cores are more powerful than most PC guys like to admit. Heck, I've already seen forums b*tching at AMD because they don't have a competing desktop solution. AMD claims that it is because they are a contracted design between itself and Microsoft and Sony, for use on consoles specifically. I'm sure there is some limited time agreement/ contract thing involved, where the tech can't be used for any other products after a set amount of time..or ever. Who knows. That is at least my guess, going by AMD's response stating not to expect to see a comparable APU for desktops any time soon...and that for now, the latest and greatest will be their Excavator cores arriving in 2015. I'll see if I can find the article again and link it back here, after work.

The Jaguar APU's are based on their old mobile Fusion APU designs, but are said to function more comparably to Opteron technology. If that is the case, these things are smokin. I mean, look at the Ubisoft benchmarks, the Xbox One CPU-side of the APU beats out the 3.2GHZ Cell processor of the PS3, while the PS4's CPU falls just shy of the Cell...of course, the Xbox One is running a slightly higher core frequency than the PS4 and is sitting on 5 billion transistors, where the PS4 is on 3.1 billion.

Most people look at these processors/ APU's and think, "well, an A10 7850k running at 4GHZ has to be faster than those pathetic 1.6GHZ Jaguars..." No, not at all, if these processors are functionally similar to an Opteron, that means that they produce an amazing amount of IPC's, which will give you a much better performance, per watt ratio, run cooler and with far less latency. Not to mention, the Jaguars are running 7790 and 7870 comparable on the GPU side...there's nothing remotely close to that available right now. So, yes, taken as a whole, Jaguars are in a league of their own for APU tech. The only way to compete is to get an A10, like myself, and a regular graphics card...or just get the Athlon version of the A10 7850k, which has no GPU integration, but is the same socket type, and pair it with a decent card...but then you defeat the APU design and portability of your system.

If the Jaguar cores were more powerful than the current ones in AMD's desktop chips, AMD would be designing their desktop chips around them. If you want console like performance from games running on your PC, configure your games to the same resolution and detail settings. If the same settings don't exist, take it up with the people who produced the game. All they would really need to do is include a button that selects the same settings as are used on either the XBOX One or PS4. I think it's for good reason that no software companies are doing that. You would see how badly the consoles are handling higher details to the tune of potentially lost sales.

A lot of people really don't know how to tune their games to run well, and they tank their performance on their PC because they "feel" that their particular computer should be able to handle things set where the gamer wants them. Some settings can completely torpedo performance, but have minimal visual impact. Play around. Benchmark. Figure out what works best for a particular title on your system and it can make the difference between looking worse than a console or better.

This and the fact desktop apus are heavily limited by ddr3 memory compared to console esram and gddr5, looking at the difference in performance of 384 and 512 core kaveri there would be no point in ps4 size gpu at this time.

All APUs in general are limited by the bandwidth of the memory subsystem that is feeding the graphics cores. The ESRAM and GDDR5 were means of dealing with the compromise of using an APU and make them viable in consoles. While those two options aren't exactly available to PC users, you usually aren't limited to the APU graphics on a PC either and in most cases can implement a better graphics system altogether.

It isn't just lazy coders causing bad experiences on the PC platform. People need to take responsibility for their own part in this. A lot of performance issues are caused by lazy, ignorant gamers who slap together bad equipment or select graphics options which perform poorly at best. If options on the PC were locked in the same manner as a console, performance on average would probably improve, but I personally don't want the trade-off. If you want your computer to play like a console, buy a console - they're purpose built PCs that will give you an expected level of performance for a set price.