AMD has officially launched its latest generation accelerated processing units (APUs) for desktops, codenamed Kaveri, opening up pre-orders for selected customers ahead of general availability.

The first of AMD’s desktop APU designs to include tweaks defined by the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) for better interoperability between the CPU and GPU portions, the first to include Graphics Core Next (GCN) technology and promising significant boosts in instructions per cycle (IPC) thanks to the new Steamroller core, it’s fair to say Kaveri is a big deal for AMD.

The flagship of the Kaveri desktop line-up is the A10-7850K, designed to take over from the A10-6800K and compete with Intel’s Core i5-4670K.

The 28nm chip’s 95W thermal design profile (TDP) gives it the headroom required for a base clock of 3.7GHz across all four cores with Turbo Mode reaching 4GHz – both a drop from the last-generation A10-6800K clock speeds, which hit 4.1GHz stock and 4.4GHz Turbo.

Compared to its predecessor, however, the A10-7850K claims a 20 per cent boost in IPC – which should translate to improved performance despite the loss of clock speed.

The GPU portion of the chip, too, has seen a down-clock from 844MHz to 720MHz – but, as with the move to Steamroller on the CPU side, AMD is pointing to the shift to GCN and an increase to 512 shaders as more than making up for that in true performance.

Indeed, figures released by the company show the A10-7850K running the PCMark benchmark some 24 per cent faster than an Intel Core i5-4670K and the 3DMark suite 87 per cent faster, compared to boosts of 15 per cent and 37 per cent for the last-generation A10-6800K.

As before, the chip supports four threads but this time offers improved cache memory: in addition to a boost from two 64KB L1 instruction caches to two 96KB caches, both L1 and L2 caches now benefit from associative sharing – designed to help the CPU and GPU cooperate on tasks, and a major part of the promise of HSA.

The company has confirmed that OEMs are able to pre-order the part now, alongside a lower-end A10-7700K part, with the first products to appear in the coming weeks.

AMD has not, however, provided a date for retail availability.

The standalone version of DayZ was released on Steam Early Access in mid-December.

The standalone version of open-world survival game DayZ is off to a remarkable start, having sold over 800,000 copies in less than three weeks — a figure that far outpaces the amount its developer hoped to sell in the game’s first three months.

In a comment on Reddit, DayZ creator Dean Hall explained what the expectations for the game were and what this outpouring of support means for the game.

“We ([publisher Bohemia Interactive] and I) had very ambitious plans for 2014 already, however this amount of sales was completely unexpected,”

he wrote.

“Honestly, 250k within a quarter was what I would have considered a success. So to move nearly 800,000 in under a month is crazy.

“We’ll be finalizing our roadmap in mid January, but it is safe to say that this kind of result will be having a very positive effect on that roadmap.”

DayZ started out as a mod for PC shooter ArmA II and quickly became incredibly popular. Hall had aspirations of turning the mod into a standalone game from the start, with that project officially being announced in mid-2012. The game has already served as the inspiration for a number of other games — some more so than others — and last month an alpha version was released on Steam as an Early Access game.

In just 12 hours, it had already seen 88,000 downloads and was attracting new player registrations at a rate of 200 per second. Now, less than three weeks later, DayZ is well on its way to one million units sold, and all without the benefit of a Steam sale — the game was routinely among the top sellers on Steam during the Steam Holiday Sale despite not being on sale.

Hall is admirably not shy about cautioning some people away from buying the game at this stage. Games in Early Access can be at many different stages of development, some more complete and playable than others. While DayZ is playable, it’s far from finished. After explaining that buying the alpha now gets you the full version once it’s released, Hall advised one prospective buyer on Reddit,

“I would recommend a very careful and critical review of whether purchasing now is such a good idea. There are many problems which can ruin your gameplay experience. These are being actively fixed – but if you delayed your purchase by a month you would pay the same price but it would be a better experience. Something to consider.”

DayZ is now available on Steam for $29.99 / €23.99 / £19.99.

While the PS4 might be setting records for the rapid pace in which each console is being bought in the UK, over in America it appears it’s a whole ‘nother story entirely. According to research by market research firm InfoScout, which surveyed purchases of consoles in several retail outlets across USA up to and including Black Friday, Microsoft consoles are being overwhelmingly favoured by the American gamer:

According to their survey, both Xbox consoles dominated sales on Friday, jointly accounting for 61% of the console market. The PlayStation 4, meanwhile, achieves a creditable third place with exactly half the XBox One sales – 15% compared to 31% – although it should be noted that the PS4 came in much more limited supplies compared to the XBox One.

A perhaps more interesting statistic from the survey is that so far, sales of both new generation consoles are keeping pace with their predecessors, with the PS3 just outselling the PS4 by a very small margin; while the XBox One only manages a 1% margin above the older 360. Continued sales of the older consoles are to be expected early in a new console’s launch, but the closeness of the statistics suggest there are still a lot of people seeing life in the now-older generation consoles yet; and feel like giving them a chance over their younger, so far less established successors…

…Though, with 80% of the surveyed claiming that they bought the console with the intention to “gift” it, it could also be that some Americans just wanted to save cash on what should still be viewed as a powerful, exciting present for the young (or young at heart) ones.

Want to know the install sizes for some Xbox One launch titles? Well you’re in luck because the U.S citizen that got his console early from U.S Retailer Target has posted them up.

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag – 20GB
Battlefield 4 – 33GB
Call of Duty: Ghosts – 39GB
Dead Rising 3 – 19GB
FIFA 14 – 8GB
Fighter Within – 9.2GB
Forza Motorsport 5 – 31GB
Just Dance 2014 – 22GB
Killer Instinct – 3.4GB
Lococyle – 13GB
Madden NFL 25 – 12GB
NBA 2K14 – 43GB
NBA Live 14 – 9GB
Powerstar Golf – 3.9GB
Ryse: Son of Rome – 34GB
Skylanders: Swap Force – 15GB
Xbox Fitness – 246MB
Zoo Tycoon – 2.6GB
Zumba World Party – 24GB

Sounds like someone is going to need a bigger hard drive, although it’ll need to be external as you cannot upgrade the Xbox One internal hard drive at this time.

Thanks to shopto.net for the original story

Where to start? That must be the big question facing DICE right now as they try and wrangle Battlefield 4 into a stable state. Players have been reporting disconnection errors, freezes, crashes and a smattering of bugs. DICE have tabled a list of fixes they’re working on on the Battlefield 4 forums, which includes a bug that stops server queues from working and various client instability problems.

Players have also been finding some odd errors, YouTubers TeamTooHeavy have posted a video that apparently shows the silencer on the QBU88 muting sound on a server. More worryingly, many players have been reporting netcode issues, which cause a discrepancy between the game logic that denotes where shots are going and when they hit, and what you’re actually seeing on-screen. If netcode’s laggy the game might tell you that you’ve just git a soldier seven times in the chest and been suddenly killed, while from your killer’s perspective he’s rounded the corner and shot you fair and square. Redditor Hickery123 has rounded up some pretty blatant video examples of this happening here.

DICE are patching speedily, thankfully, which marks a change from Battlefield 3 when every patch had to go through Microsoft and Sony bureaucracy. A lot of Battlefield 4’s multiplayer component operates server-side, so they no longer have to deploy updates and downloads to every player’s PC to deal with issues. Battlefield 3 also had some major problems on release, and ended up okay, but it’s a particularly frustrating situation when a big open beta event happened just weeks ago.

The connection issues seem to be affecting 64 player servers more frequently, so you might want to steer clear of those for a while. If the server runs into an error, all of the levelling progress you made during the match will be lost, but reportedly this will suck up XP boost time regardless, so it’s best to save those until the server issues are fixed.