The first major component launch of 2014 falls at the feet of AMD and the next iteration of its APU platform, Kaveri. Kaveri has been the aim for AMD for several years, it's actually the whole reason the company bought ATI back in 2006. As a result many different prongs of AMD’s platform come together: HSA, hUMA, offloading compute, unifying GPU architectures, developing a software ecosystem around HSA and a scalable architecture. This is, on paper at least, a strong indicator of where the PC processor market is heading in the mainstream segment. For our Kaveri review today we were sampled the 45/65W (cTDP) A8-7600 and 95W A10-7850K Kaveri models. The A10-7850K is available today while the A8 part will be available later in Q1.
There are numerous trends that have been ongoing in the recent years on the market of central processing units (CPUs): increasing share of x86 CPUs with integrated graphics engines and heterogeneous multi-core chips in general, growing importance of low-power and mobile x86 processors, emergence of high-performance ARM system-on-chips for mobile and server applications, and some others. In 2014 all those trends will have a tremendous effect on the market.